vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above is a second excellent tateken poster for Shin joshuu sasori: 701-gô, known in English as New Female Prisoner Scorpion: 701, with Yumi Takigawa dressed in black from head to toe and looking ready to deal out death. These tateken style promos are rare, so we’re happy to have found two. As usual, we like to share posters on a film’s premiere date, and that was today in 1976.
We’ve already shared two posters for Yumi Takigawa’s women-in-prison pinky violence flick Shin joshuu sasori: 701-gô, aka New Female Prisoner Scorpion: 701, which premiered today in 1976. Above is the slightly different tateken sized poster, added here for the sake of completeness. The film is a reboot of the original Female Prisoner Scorpion series starring Meiko Kaji, and most consider it to be of lesser quality than the first four films, but quality is a relative term in pinku. Some would say all the films are bad. Not us. But some would say that. Bonus material: a Yumi promo image below. And you can see the other posters here and here.
A couple a years ago we wrote briefly about and shared a poster for the Yumi Takigawa headlined pinku flick Shin joshuu sasori: 701-gô, aka New Female Prisoner Scorpion: 701. Above is another poster from the film, actually the standard poster, as opposed to the bo-ekibari, or horizontal two-piece we showed you before. It’s a great image, as is the very Yumi shot of Takigawa accompanying it. See the other poster here.
This poster for Shin joshuu sasori: 701-gô, aka New Female Prisoner Scorpion: 701 promotes the first film in what today might be called a franchise reboot. Meiko Kaji established the character of Prisoner 701 in four hit films, and a few years after she left Toei Company decided to resurrect the series with Yumi Takigawa in the lead. Framed for murder, she ends up in a women’s prison where she’s harassed, sexually assaulted, and marked for death. A prison riot finally gives her the chance at revenge, and let’s just say she takes full advantage.
Way back in 2009 two promos for Seijû gakuen were the first pinku posters we ever shared on Pulp Intl. Ah, the good old days. We got the title wrong and misspelled the name of the star, but other than that, what a glorious memory. When we located that pair of posters we also found two others, and now, years later, we’re getting around to sharing those too. Seijû gakuen was known in the West as School of the Holy Beast, and above you see a rare two panel horizontal poster. At that orientation it renders a little small here, so we’ve posted the panels seperately below:
If you haven’t seen a nunsploitation flick you really haven’t lived. Norifumi Suzuki’s shlock masterpiece Seijû gakuen, aka School of the Holy Beast, has a little bit of everything, including blood, whippings, copious nudity, and lots of tender lesbian love. The beautiful Yumi Takigawa plays a woman who enters a convent in order to learn why her mother died there eighteen years earlier. Surprise surprise, she finds herself trapped in a den of depravity that would make de Sade blanch. When nuns go bad, they go real bad. But blasphemy never looked so gorgeous. And neither have the movie’s posters. The version above is the standard one, hard to find but not impossible. Below is the two panel version, and it’s exceedingly rare. Seijû gakuen opened in Japan today in 1972.
In San Diego, thirty-nine members of a cult called Heaven’s Gate are found dead after committing suicide in the belief that a UFO hidden in tail of the Hale-Bopp comet was a signal that it was time to leave Earth for a higher plane of existence. The cult members killed themselves by ingesting pudding and applesauce laced with poison.
On the basis of alleged obscenity, United States Customs officials seize 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” that had been shipped from a London printer. The poem contained mention of illegal drugs and explicitly referred to sexual practices. A subsequent obscenity trial was brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran City Lights Bookstore, the poem’s domestic publisher. Nine literary experts testified on the poem’s behalf, and Ferlinghetti won the case when a judge decided that the poem was of redeeming social importance.
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia dies after his nephew Prince Faisal Ibu Musaed shoots him during a royal audience. As King Faisal bent forward to kiss his nephew the Prince pulled out a pistol and shot him under the chin and through the ear. King Faisal died in the hospital after surgery. The prince is later beheaded in the public square in Riyadh.
Fugitive thief Ronnie Biggs, a British citizen who was a member of the gang that pulled off the Great Train Robbery, is rescued by police in Barbados after being kidnapped. Biggs had been abducted a week earlier from a bar in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by members of a British security firm. Upon release he was returned to Brazil and continued to be a fugitive from British justice.
American actress Elizabeth Taylor, whose career began at age 12 when she starred in National Velvet, and who would eventually be nominated for five Academy Awards as best actress and win for Butterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, dies of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles. During her life she had been hospitalized more than 70 times.
