Pulp International

vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news

SUKEBAN AT LARGE

It's gonna be a wild time in the old town when Reiko comes around.

“Sukeban” is a Japanese word that means, basically, “girl gangster.” You see a collection of them on this poster for Sukeban: Taiman shobu, but the most important one is the boss—or banchô—Reiko Ike, who sits atop the art and who we saw just a couple of days ago. The movie, known in the U.S. as Girl Boss 6: Mano a Mano, or sometimes Girl Boss: Diamond Showdown, premiered today in 1974, and is a staple entry in Toei Company’s pinky violence cycle, the sixth entry in a series.

In the opening Reiko is thrown in prison for trying to kill the yakuza leader responsible for the death of her sister. A credit sequence montage shows us how she’s toughened in a juvenile facility. When she’s released she needs to help a friend, one of the previous parolees, out of a financial jam, which brings her back into contact with the organization of the man she tried to kill. Synchronism? Well, screenwriting.

When a duel she wins places her at the head of a group of troublemakers called the Sunflower Gang, Reiko suddenly has muscle as well as determination, however a chance meeting with someone who mistreated her in juvie but who’s now reformed and married makes her think more deeply about life. Maybe she isn’t destined to be a lone she-wolf after all. Maybe life is bigger than revenge. But there are subplots, and you can bet Reiko will find herself in the middle of them—surrounded by bad men.

Sukeban: Taiman shobu relates its story in frenetic style, and Reiko, cute as hell of course, gives her typical physically demanding action performance and uses those soulful chocolate eyes of hers to induce audience sympathy for her tough outside/soft inside character. Other entries in this series may be better, but we enjoy pinky violence flicks in general. They’re fun, exotic, and sometimes surprising. And as for Reiko—she’s incomparable.

Japan, Toei Company, Sukeban: Taiman Shobu, Girl Boss: Mano a Mano, Girl Boss: Diamond Showdown, Reiko Ike, Tsunehiko Watase, Ryôko Ema, Tôru Abe, Rena Ichinose, Ritsuko Fujiyama, pinku, pinky violence, yakuza, poster art, cinema, movie review

CRIMINAL ACTIVITY

Hell, hell, the gang's all here.

This beautiful poster promotes the crime drama Furyô Banchô: dobunezumi sakusen, known in English as Delinquent Boss: Rat Thief’s Strategy. Just check out the insets below that we’ve excised from this fantastic piece. It was painted by Shigeru Yokotsuka as an alternate to the standard promo poster, which is a photo-illustration. This, on the other hand, is a frameable masterpiece. The movie is about a group of Osaka hoods that go to Tokyo and get into conflict with the local yakuza. Sounds fun, but we haven’t found the movie yet. We’ll keep looking. It premiered in Japan today in 1969.

Japan, Toei Company, Furyô Banchô: dobunezumi sakusen, Delinquent Boss: Rat Thief's Strategy, Shigeru Yokotsuka, Yukie Kagawa, Yasushi Suzuki, Hayato Tani, Tatsuo Umemiya, poster art, cinema, yakuza

WAR CRIMINALS

Honor and humanity are always the first casualties.

Above you see a poster for a Japanese film called Jingi naki tatakai: Sôshûhen, known in English as Battles without Honor and Humanity. Aside from having one of the great titles in cinematic history (though it’s also known less poetically as The Yakuza Papers), this is a landmark production from Toei Company, helmed by director Kinji Fukasaku, and starring Bunta Sugawara, Hiroki Matsukata, Kunie Tanaka, and Gorô Ibuki. It was the first of what turned out to be a five film series, all adapted from Weekly Sankei newspaper articles by journalist Kōichi Iiboshi that were themselves distillations of material originally written by an actual yakuza named Kōzō Minō.

The movies are a deep dive into organized crime in postwar Japan, and in this first entry various yakuza clan allegiances and hatreds are formed in the shattered and lawless cities controlled by the occupying U.S. soldiers, who are themselves without many scruples. Sugawara becomes enmeshed in violence that leads to his imprisonment, there to become blood brothers with a yakuza footsoldier. Upon release from jail Sugawara goes to work for the same clan as his friend, and this group becomes the feared Yamamori crime family.

From that point the movie follows the fortunes and misfortunes of various families vying for supremacy, as loyalties shift and betrayals beget betrayals. This will probably be hard to follow for most viewers, as many characters have been introduced in rapid succession during the opening minutes, but the focus is always on Sugawara. The story plays out over years, with important characters singled out via freeze frame when they die, and noted with onscreen titles: December 17, 1949: _______ died. By the film’s final frame, a clean conclusion has not been reached (hence sequels).

From the movie’s opening credits, shown atop an image of the nuked core of Hiroshima and the skeletal dome of the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, to its narrated interstitials, and its overlays of subtitles, there’s a historical feel here and a weightiness that had perhaps been unseen to that point in yakuza dramas. While the film is often called the Japanese version of The Godfather, it isn’t the same type of movie and isn’t on the same technical level. It may occupy a similar place in Japanese cinema culture, but Battles without Honor and Humanity is its own thing. A very good thing, and a mandatory watch for fans of Japanese film. It premiered today in 1973.

Japan, Toei Company, Jingi naki tatakai: Sôshûhen, Battles without Honor and Humanity, The Yakuza Papers, Bunta Sugawara, Hiroki Matsukata, Kunie Tanaka, Gorô Ibuki, Kinji Fukasaku, Kōzō Minō, Kinji Fukasaku, poster art, cinema, yakuza, movie review

FIND YOUR BLISS

Happiness is often in the place you least expect.

Did we just say to quit with the roman pornos while we’re ahead? Well, we failed. We watched a second movie from the genre, and as it’s our third film of the day you might be wondering why this sudden surplus of screening time has arisen. It’s because the girls are out of town. Into that gap we’ve been plugging every flick we can find that premiered this week, including this one that opened today in 1978—Toruko 110-ban: Monzetsu kurage. Known in English as Bathhouse 911: Jellyfish Bliss, it starred Etsuko Hara, Yuko Katagiri, and Yuki Yoshizawa, and right off the bat we’ll tell you it wasn’t as good as Hirusagari no joji: Uramado. But it wasn’t bad either. Huh? Two decent roman pornos in a row? Two in a row without sexual torture? It really happened. Though we should caution—there’s an enema. But a guy takes it, and it’s played for laughs. So… fine then.

In addition to avoiding too much extreme content, this movie is fantastically shot. It bursts with color, and is largely a clinic in composition in that way specific to roman porno where directors suggested explicitness but weren’t legally allowed to show even a single pubic hair. The story deals with a smalltime pimp who picks up Etsuko Hara on the street and turns her into a prostitute in a bathhouse. When the yakuza move in on his operation and take Etsuko away he suffers in the throes what he’s realized is love. But there’s little he can do, save vividly fantasize about revenge. Will he actually screw up the courage to fight for Etsuko’s freedom? We’d recommend getting a new profession, one where the competition isn’t tattooed guys with katanas, but if the odds weren’t long it wouldn’t be a movie worth watching. Feel free to do so. There’s hope for this genre yet.

Japan, Nikkatsu, Toruko 110-ban: Monzetsu kurage, Bathhouse 911: Jellyfish Bliss, Etsuko Hara, Yuko Katagiri, Yuki Yoshizawa, roman porno, pinku, sexploitation, poster art, cinema, yakuza, prostitution, nudity, movie review

DIAMONDS AREN’T FOREVER

The deeper into the Underworld you go the hotter it gets until everyone—and everything—is liable to get burned.


The two tatekan style posters you see above were made for the Japanese crime drama Ankokugai no bijo, the title of which means “beauty of the underworld,” and which was known in English as Underworld Beauty. The movie is about a bunch of gangsters chasing after some diamonds. Co-star Tôru Abe has them first, but when the yakuza catch up to him, he swallows them and jumps off a roof, ending up in a hospital. He soon dies and the treasure is cut out of his body, but that’s merely the beginning of a struggle to retain their possession. Abe’s sister, played by Mari Shiraki, is the underground beauty of the title, and gets tangled up with the mobsters. They say diamonds are forever, but we’re told early in the film when it seems as if the coveted stones might go into a crematorium with Abe’s body, that they can actually burn. That’s clumsy foreshadowing, but Underworld Beauty still manages to be an interesting and mostly satisfying film. It premiered today in 1958.

Japan, Nikkatsu, Ankokugai no bijo, Underworld Beauty, Michitarô Mizushima, Mari Shiraki, Shinsuke Ashida, Tôru Abe, yakuza, poster art, cinema, movie review

HARD TARGET

His wife sometimes made him so mad he felt like he could kill her. Then the opportunity came.


We’ve watched a lot of movies this month, and today is the day we begin squeezing them onto the site before the end of the year. The shooter’s POV poster above was made for Aiyoku no wana, aka Trap of Lust, which is a roman porno reinterpretation of Seijun Suzuki’s 1967 gangster classic Koroshi no rakuin, aka Branded to Kill. It’s the story of a veteran hitman who botches an assignment, with the unexpected consequence that he’s ordered to kill his own wife.

It isn’t a punishment thing, exactly, that brings this about. The reason she becomes his target is narratively more complex. But killing one’s spouse is not easy even for a cold-blooded professional terminator, and ultimately he’s pitted against a couple of top yakuza hitmen, one of whom is a freaky deaky assassin who does his work alongside a nearly life-sized marionette that he voices like a schoolgirl. We know it sounds out there, and it is. Look at the screenshots below for an idea what this disturbed character is about.

The marionette gimmick isn’t totally gratuitous. It contributes to a pivotal duel that by itself nudges the movie onto the positive side of the watch/don’t watch ledger. While we’re tempted to get into the weird psychocultural reasons why embodiments of pure human evil in Japanese films are often covered in brown shoe polish, we’ll just leave the obvious unspoken. Ready for something bizarre? Then go for it. Aiyoku no wana premiered in Japan today in 1973.
Japan, Nikkatsu, Aiyoku no wana, Trap of Lust, Koroshi no rakuin, Branded to Kill, Genjiro Arato, Moeko Ezawa, Rie Nakagawa, poster art, cinema, yakuza, movie review

LUST AND FOUND

You can attain enlightenment through years of mental discipline, rigid study, and incessant ritual. Or you can just get properly laid once.


Above you see a poster for Yakuza kannon: Iro Jingi, known in English as Yakuza Justice: Erotic Code of Honor, and to dive right into this one, the movie starts bizarrely when a fisherman hooks the corpse of a drowned woman. She died pregnant, and defying all scientific laws, the fisherman delivers the child, though in real life a fetus survives only a few minutes once a mother’s incubating machinery stops. But perhaps there’s something mystical at work.

The infant grows into handsome Jirô Okazaki, who has been indoctrinated into monkdom and lives and works on the grounds of a vast temple complex. Onto those grounds one day comes Nozomi Yasuda, who is the daughter of a yakuza boss, and is promised to another yakuza boss. But she’s broken the engagement, and when her erstwhile fiancée sends men to kidnap her the attempted snatch happens right in front of Okazaki. Boy saves girl, and sparks fly.

Okazaki’s days had been filled by the typical meditation and drudgery of monks, but dealing with the slick yakuza and getting some sweet, sweet Yasuda lovin’ changes him to the point where he soon sees the world through a modern, violent, sexual lens. He says at one point (speaking about himself in third person, which we guess monks do): “Seigen has had a taste of earthly life—starting with the tip of his cock.” The eloquence of the man is stunning.

The tale then takes a circular route that explains how Okazaki’s mother ended up dead in that river in the first place. It’s a stretch, but when it comes to Japanese films from this era that was their stock-in-trade. Okazaki continues down a dark path and eventually risks losing himself. Or finding himself, if you believe this is always who he was under his monk’s robes. Birth or rebirth—in either case, Yakuza kannon: Iro Jingi is a pretty interesting story of transformation. It premiered today in 1973.
Japan, Nikkatsu, Yakuza kannon: Iro Jingi, Yakuza Justice: Erotic Code of Honor, Jirô Okazaki, Nozomi Yasuda, Chizuyu Azami, poster art, cinema, yakuza, movie review

FIRE ENGINE RED

Bunta Sugawara spits hot lead in Machine Gun Dragon.

Cagney! Bogart! And… Bunta? This poster, if you look at the text in the righthand margin, suggests that Bunta Sugawara is a gangster on that level. We’ll see about that in a minute, but one thing is sure—this is a kick-ass image of him. It was made for his crime flick Yokohama ankokugai mashingan no ryu, known in English as Yokohama Underworld: The Machine-Gun Dragon. Sugawara plays a rogue gunman, thief, and fashion plate who decides to rob the Matsumi yakuza clan of a billion yen worth of drugs. Ill gotten gains are hard to keep in crime movies, so you know already what the story arc is here: the people he robbed come looking for him.

However, there are some quirks. For example, Sugawara has a disturbingly close relationship with his mother. The two take baths together, as mom dispenses parental wisdom like, “The most important thing in the world is money. A guy without money is garbage. He might as well not have a dick,” while peeking at Sugawara’s dick, which thankfully is out-of-frame. It’s under mom’s influence that Sugawara robs the Matsumi group, a heist the pair pull off in the first moments of the film. They plan to hold the goods until the heat cools, but another gang deduces that Sugawara was involved and demands half the drugs for not turning him over. The cops are soon closing in too, since the robbery resulted in a quadruple homicide.

Eventually, Sugawara engineers his own arrest. It’s the only way he can avoid capture by the yakuza, and in jail he can presumably regroup. But Matsumi has men inside. Those men have no idea how ruthless and resourceful Sugawara is, and in the film’s best sequences he shows how survival inside this particular prison is about who’s willing to be the most vicious. He doesn’t spend long in jail, which means that upon release his problems still must be faced. But fire breathing dragons are very hard to kill. As hard as Cagney and Bogart? Well, let’s just say that if Bunta goes out, he’ll go out guns blazing. Yokohama ankokugai mashingan no ryu premiered in Japan today in 1976.

Japan, Yokohama ankokugai mashingan no ryu, Yokohama Underworld: The Machine-Gun Dragon, Bunta Sugawara, Shin'ichi Chiba, Sonny Chiba, Aiko Mimasu, Kyôko Enami, poster art, cinema, yakuza, movie review

SINGLE BULLET THEORY

The shot heard 'round Japan.

This unusual poster was made to promote a film called Teppôdama no bigaku, known in English by the cool title Aesthetics of a Bullet. The movie came from Art Theatre Guild, or ATG, producers of films in the loose category known as Japanese New Wave, meaning to take a new approach to filmmaking by rejecting traditional ideas and techniques. This one was directed by Sadao Nakajima and stars Tsunehiko Watase as a hot-headed two-bit hustler named Kiyoshi who tries numerous schemes to get ahead, including being a chef, gambling, and breeding rabbits. He fails at all of them, and he’s desperate for a break.

When he’s given a job by a local yakuza cartel known as Tenyu Group, he quickly learns about the power of a gun. With it he can command others, make them fear and respect him, make them literally kneel. With this gun his sense of self worth is first restored, then inflated. He caresses it, brandishes it, polishes it, treats it better than even the women he lusts for, and the gun confirms that he’s superior to others. And once he feels superior he becomes—not to put too fine a point on it—a total asshole. He’s actually an abusive chump even before the gun, but the weapon fully unleashes his destructive, hyper-masculine impulses.

The things he does are too ridiculously stupid to get into. Suffice it to say that even for a regular guy these would lead to trouble, but he’s Tenyu Group’s thug-at-large, which means his erratic behavior and explosive anger offends the other crime bosses. Pretty soon he discovers that he’s torn a dangerous rift in the yakuza network. But what Kiyoshi doesn’t know—which the audience does from the beginning—is that Tenyu Group hired him in the first place precisely because he’s a disruptive fuck-up. Their theory was always that he would spark a gang war. All he has to do is fire that beloved gun once and Tenyu Group will have the excuse it needs.

Aesthetics of a Bullet is obscure, so we knew nothing about it, but we liked it. It’s concise, has a strong point of view, and a good supporting cast that includes Miki Sugimoto and Mitsuru Mori. Its only flaw—perhaps unavoidable—is that the lead character is such a misanthropic troublemaker that we could barely tolerate watching him. But we guess that’s where the whole rejecting traditional filmmaking comes in. Who needs a likeable or even sympathetic lead? Real life is more complicated than that, and Kiyoshi’s fictional life gets plenty complicated too. Even if you can’t root for him, at least he won’t bore you, and neither will the movie. Aesthetics of a Bullet premiered in Japan today in 1973.

Japan, Art Theatre Guild, Teppôdama no bigaku, Aesthetics of a Bullet, Tsunehiko Watase, Miki Sugimoto, Mitsuru Mori, Sadao Nakajima, poster art, cinema, yakuza, movie review
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1937—H.P. Lovecraft Dies

American sci-fi/horror author Howard Phillips Lovecraft dies of intestinal cancer in Providence, Rhode Island at age 46. Lovecraft died nearly destitute, but would become the most influential horror writer of all time. His imaginary universe of malign gods and degenerate cults was influenced by his explicitly racist views, but his detailed and procedural style of writing, which usually pitted men of science or academia against indescribable monsters, remains as effective today as ever.

2011—Illustrator Michel Gourdon Dies

French pulp artist Michel Gourdon, who was the less famous brother of Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan, dies in Coudray, France aged eighty-five. He is known mainly for the covers he painted for the imprint Flueve Noir, but worked for many companies and produced nearly 3,500 book fronts during his career.

1964—Ruby Found Guilty of Murder

In the U.S. a Dallas jury finds nightclub owner and organized crime fringe-dweller Jack Ruby guilty of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruby had shot Oswald with a handgun at Dallas Police Headquarters in full view of multiple witnesses and photographers. Allegations that he committed the crime to prevent Oswald from exposing a conspiracy in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy have never been proven.

1925—Scopes Monkey Trial Ends

In Tennessee, the case of Scopes vs. the State of Tennessee, involving the prosecution of a school teacher for instructing his students in evolution, ends with a conviction of the teacher and establishment of a new law definitively prohibiting the teaching of evolution. The opposing lawyers in the case, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, both earn lasting fame for their participation in what was a contentious and sensational trial.

1933—Roosevelt Addresses Nation

Franklin D. Roosevelt uses the medium of radio to address the people of the United States for the first time as President, in a tradition that would become known as his “fireside chats”. These chats were enormously successful from a participation standpoint, with multi-millions tuning in to listen. In total Roosevelt would make thirty broadcasts over the course of eleven years.

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BABE IN THE WOODS

This idyllic scene for Folco Romano’s 1958 novel Quand la chair s’éveille was painted by Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan. You'd never suspect a book with a cover this pretty was banned in France, but it was.

PERMANENT VACATION

Hillman Publications produced unusually successful photo art for this cover of 42 Days for Murder by Roger Torrey.

LIKE AND CHAIR

Cover art by French illustrator James Hodges for Hans J. Nording's 1963 novel Poupée de chair.

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