At top, a poster for the Hitomi Kozue roman porno flick Nikutai hanzai kaigan: Piranha no mure, aka Sex-Crime Coast: School of Piranha. In this one Kozue rises out of the sea like Aphrodite, which is how we always suspected she came to be. Well, okay, she isn’t actually a deity, but she’s certainly one of the more beautiful actresses of her era. We’d have loved to see her in some western crossovers, but it never happened, though in our opnion she had the screen charisma to entice global audiences.In this film she isn’t showcased at her best. She plays an insipid and annoying bad girl who’s part of a small gang of criminals in the seaside region of Shōnan, along Sagami Bay. The gang callis itself the Piranhas, and Hitomi’s the main squeeze of the gang’s leader Rikiya Dan. They happily commit mayhem together, but when Dan encounters Masumi Jun it looks as if Hitomi’s position as HBIC is under threat. Romance is never easy in these films, and in this case jealousy brings distrust and violence into the Piranha clan.
We could tell you more, but why bother? This is Nikkatsu Studios, and it’s roman porno, so you know exactly what you’ll get here. There’s joyful violence, a very blurry line where sexual consent resides, and straight-up rape too. We still don’t truly understand these films and we probably never will, but millions of Japanese cinemagoers loved them, so we’ll defer to their taste for the time being. But we’re starting to form some definite opinions. Nikutai hanzai kaigan: Piranha no mure premiered in Japan today in 1973.
