03.27.06

I'm tickled pink. I discovered a Japanese movie genre that's new to me. Yay!

Some call it "pinky violence" (Japanese term for the genre is sukeban; meaning "girl boss.") It's fabulous. What's not to like about 1970s, bad girl, Japanese (s)exploitation flicks? Hmm?

In Japan there's a long tradition of samurai films and series. What we don't often hear about a lot are the women heroes of the genre--and there are entire series about women samurai and yakuza out adventuring.

Pinky violence simply updates the traditional samurai movies in all the glorious badness of early 1970s clothing, music, and hair.

I watched the Pinky Violence collection over the weekend. This collection brings together the best of Toei Films' bad girl cinema. It includes:

Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom (the grammar geek in me is thrilled that the apostrophe is in the correct place) in which a girls' high school is run by a sadistic clique who blackmail, maim, and kill their way into a confrontation with the (comparatively) good-gal yakuza. Directed by the same guy that brought us School of the Holy Beast (I raved about that one a while back), it's a collection of things so wrong that the cumulative effect is oh-so-right. Before the opening credits, see a girl's blood drained until she's almost dead! Watch as a union-suited government official does naughty things with a vibrator! Rioting high school girls! Catfights! Whee!

Criminal Woman: Killing Melody is the story of one woman's revenge on the yakuza who killed her father, and gang-raped her. She ends up in jail after a failed attempt on the yakuza boss who ordered her father's death. In jail, she bonds with a group of kick-ass women. Great chainsaw fu and cigarette fu.

Girl Boss Guerilla features tough biker chicks (on adorable Yamahas) from Tokyo who take over the girl gangs in Kyoto. There's some (quite literal) toilet humour--but watch as the girls scam and blackmail Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, and dose the local yakuza with the clap. Warning: gratuitous rotating circular bed sex.

Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess In which a young, recently-released from jail delinquent (with a heart of gold) gets herself involved in the lives and mis-adventures of her new boss and re-connects with friends from inside the Big House. Filmed mostly in Shinjuku, the old nightclub and sexworkers' haunt in Tokyo, it's filled with leering sararimen, lots of shots of panties, fabulous clothing and decor of the era, and a great shot-from-below epic battle with lurid gore everywhere.

From the leering businessmen, to the open-shirted yakuza, to the blood-draining girl gang there are beasts a-plenty in every (roughly) 90 minute film. Plenty of breasts (good) and tattooed breasts (even better) flashed at every opportunity. Gallons and buckets and vats of arterial-red, cinematic, blood spewing in every film.

Kill Bill? Cute. Pinky violence? Rocks.

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