Deathblog: Norifumi Suzuki (1933 – 2014)

“But entertainment, see... if you look back at its history in Japan, it's been anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, since the Edo Period. That's precisely what thrills the audience. You've got to have that element somewhere. The reason why the general public seeks out stories of revolution is because they're searching for some kind of catharsis. They're looking for an escape from oppression.

Of course, it was different with Shochiku audiences. But with us, Toei audiences, they wanted anti-authoritarian movies, no question. That was a given. Because the reason why I feel so strongly about these films, about mass entertainment, is because the real world is no fun for us... and I want to toss a rock at authority. But listen, my films aren't exactly masterpieces... half the time, they're nothing but pure fun. Amusement!”

Some sad news reached me on the trans-continental grapevine this weekend regarding the passing of a director who I think it’s safe to say is one of the heroes of this blog (not to mention the uncontested world champion of making films with wacky sub-titles), the one and only Norifumi Suzuki.

(N.B. - Though his name is sometimes romanised as ‘Noribumi’, which I suspect to be more correct, I’ll go with ‘Norifumi’ in this post, just to remain consistent with previous discussions of him on this blog.)

Writing a post about Norifumi the person is difficult, because whilst I have been consistently fascinated (as well as entertained, astounded and occasionally sickened) by his films, I still know almost nothing at all about the man behind them. Whilst some of his films have definitely picked up a bit of a reputation as ‘cult classics’ in the West, his name remains relatively little known, and, to my knowledge, no one has ever really taken the time to translate an interview with him into English or undertake any critical or biographical writing about him, meaning that, personality-wise, he remains a complete unknown.

Given this dearth of information, you can imagine my surprise and frustration when I wandered into a chain bookstore in Tokyo when I was over there in January, and discovered that Japanese speakers can pick up the guy’s goddamn autobiography, which was proudly displayed amongst the top-selling items in the Cinema section. One of many occasions during my visits to Japan when I could almost weep at my pathetic monolingual status.

Anyway, with such resources remaining unavailable to me, my sole source of Norifumi knowledge remains an online translation of a fourteen minute youtube interview, which I found here. Thankfully, it’s pretty concise and revealing sorta stuff, so quotes from the translation will be used at the beginning and end of this post. That aside though, we’ll have to build a picture of the guy solely through his movies - which suits me, because I always seem to have a lot to say about them.

My own introduction to the ways of Norifumi Suzuki actually came quite a while ago, before I’d really started to develop much of an interest in weird cinema, when, inspired by a highly misleading blurb in our local art cinema’s monthly listings which presented the film as a kind of wham bam, must-see Grindhouse-style action spectacular, a friend and I attended a one-off screening of 1974’s ‘School of the Holy Beast’. Bad move. Largely unschooled in the ways of global exploitation cinema, never mind the particularly savage Japanese iterations thereof, we emerged pale, quivering and speechless from this sordid epic of Sadean, pink eiga-style nunsploitation, causing a mutual friend to greet us with words to the effect of “Jesus Christ, what the hell happened to you guys?”

Whilst I have subsequently made a full recovery from the trauma of this screening (well, if you can take the existence of this blog as evidence of recovery, at least), my poor friend remains a little scarred to this day, and is still extremely reluctant to commit to a viewing of any film I’ve recommended, lest the terrible nightmare of sadistic Japanese nun porn begin again. (An understandable concern, to be honest.)

The irony here is though, if the cinema had instead chosen to show pretty much any other example of the fantastic run of films Suzuki made in the first half of the ‘70s, well, I guess we might still have been a bit unnerved by some of the sexual content, but basically I think we’d have got on-board with it and had a blast. I’ve written before here about the spirit of no-holds-barred craziness that seemed to characterise the output of Toei studios in the early ‘70s, and, more than any of their other directors, it was Norifumi-san who really made this style his own.

It is interesting to note though that whilst his films in this era seem to embody an “I couldn’t give a FUCK” spirit that suggests the presence of a speed-huffing, cop-hating teenager behind the camera, Suzuki was actually a seasoned industry professional by the time he initiated the Sukeban/Girl Boss series in 1971, and it is this underlying technical proficiency that keeps his work engaging even in its stupidest and most ragged moments.

What little biographical info is available to me reveals that Suzuki entered the film industry after dropping out of Kyoto’s prestigious Ritsumeikan University in 1956, joining Toei’s Kyoto division shortly thereafter, and working as an assistant director for a few years, until he moved up to scripting and directing in the mid-‘60s. He first made a big impact (as far as I know?) when he wrote the script for 1968’s ‘Red Peony Gambler’, a vehicle for his niece Junko Fuji, which proved successful enough to generate a total of eight sequels, most of them either scripted or supervised by Suzuki. He also directed the second film in the series (ranked as one of the best entries by Chris D’s Gun & Sword), and helmed two spin-offs starring a popular supporting character from the series, one of which bears the alluring translated title ‘Silk Hat Boss: The Short-Moustached Bear’.

I’ve yet to dig into the ‘Red Peony Gambler’ films (I have the first two buried somewhere in the ‘to watch’ pile), but from what I’ve read, they are often seen as breaking new ground in regard to allowing their female heroine to single-handedly hold her own in action sequences and sword fights, and have been singled out by several writers as a key influence on the veritable explosion of female action films and ‘pinky violence’ exploiters that followed over the next few years.

Viewed in hindsight after several years of watching every example of the form that I can get my hands on (I have no regrets.. well, maybe one or two, but let’s move on..), it’s easy to see the development of the Sukeban/Pinky Violence sub-genre as a bit of an arms race when it comes to the inclusion of sleaze and violence. Nikkatsu’s ‘Stray Cat Rock’ films, excellent and hard-hitting though the best entries may be, were relatively restrained in this regard, initially pitched more as youth / rock music films, and thus Toei’s competing ‘Delinquent Girl Boss’ series starring Reiko Oshida upped the ante, with a greater emphasis on organised crime and revenge-orientated action. These in turn were rendered thoroughly mild in comparison to the successor series Toei cooked up to replace them, and it is here that we meet Norifumi-san again, as he begins the astonishing run of films that would really put him on the map for fans of insane cinema with the staggering outburst of high octane deviancy that is Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack (1971).

As I’ve written extensively about that film before, I won’t repeat myself, but will simply say that if you’re unfamiliar with these ‘Girl Boss’ movies then, brace yourself, because they’re quite an experience. Suzuki directed three sequels to ‘Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack’, all presumably thrown together at great speed, as very much befits his guerrilla film-making style: ‘Queen Bee’s Challenge’, ‘Girl Boss Guerrilla’ (both 1972) and the succinctly titled ‘Sukeban’ (aka ‘Girl Boss: Revenge’, 1973). All of these feature incredible moments and are well worth tracking down if you liked the first one, but their habit of slavishly reiterating the same formula and plot elements time after time means that the law of diminishing returns inevitably comes into play, and by the end of the fourth film, I think it was high time for the director to pull down the shutters and move on.

One of the most distinctive elements of the ‘Girl Boss’ films is their capacity to pull off jarring shifts in tone, as each follows a similar pattern of opening with half an hour or so of light-hearted action and bawdy sex comedy antics, before taking a darker turn for a middle section of yakuza-instigated violence and sexual humiliation, then pulling things together for a surprisingly serious final act that often takes in moments of genuine character development and emotional catharsis – a combination of conflicting elements that went on to define the uneasy ‘have-your-cake-and-eat-it’ approach to the portrayal of women that underpins all of Suzuki’s best films.

In parallel with the Sukeban films, Suzuki also directed a number of period-set sex films for Toei (including ‘The Lustful Shogun and His 21 Concubines’ and ‘Tokugawa Sex Ban: Lustful Lord’, both 1972), and these two threads of his work came together (so to speak) in 1973 to create what is arguably the director’s masterpiece, and probably one of the greatest exploitation films ever made (IMHO), ‘Ocho: Tale of a Rebellious Elder Sister’, better known in the West under the wholly appropriate title Sex & Fury.

Whether planned as a blood & boobs enhanced update of the ‘Red Peony Gambler’ formula, or as a middle-finger aimed at Toho’s ‘Lady Snowblood’ films (both speculation on my part), there is little doubt that ‘Sex & Fury’ is simply fucking brilliant, succeeding on every level that a film like this could conceivably aim at. From the moment Reiko Ike leaps naked from her bathtub to bloodily slaughter an army of yakuza, your jaw will hit the floor, and will likely remain there through most of the running time, as a positively epic array of libidinous mayhem unfolds, all of it realised in a vibrant and confident, pop-art infused cinematic style that matches and perhaps even surpasses that of subversive Japanese pop-cinema godhead Seijun Suzuki, whilst at the same time, a deep and conflicted dialogue about the nature of Japan’s place in the modern world sizzles away in the background. Just astonishing.

And, rounding out Norifumi’s phenomenally busy schedule during these years, we find yet another utterly raging series of transgressive and/or despicable bad girl focussed movies: the ‘Terrifying Girls’ High School’ series. Actually, our man only directed the first two of these four films, and thus far I’ve only managed to find one of them in sub-titled form, but boy is it a winner. Along with ‘Sex & Fury’, Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom gets my vote for Suzuki’s best film, a cranked up chronicle of blood-curdling depravity, delinquent sisterhood and alternate world WIP weirdness that takes the anti-authoritarian streak that was bubbling under in the director’s earlier films and explodes it into a hellish howl in the face of official corruption, unthinking nationalism and societal conformity, culminating in a full-scale riot that plays out like Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If..’ as reimagined by Koji Wakamatsu, complete with a burning Japanese flag and riot police being beaten down by mini-skirted sukeban warriors.

Another theme that seems to run deeply through all the Norifumi Suzuki films I’ve seen is the mockery and general subversion of religious imagery, and that of Christianity in particular. I don’t know whether or not Suzuki was raised a Christian, but the fascination/repulsion with such imagery that he seems to crowbar into just about all of his films would certainly suggest as much, even as the disrespectful treatment frequently dished out to representatives of Buddhism and Shinto signposts a wider problem with organised religion in general. The ‘Girl Boss’ films overflow with hypocritical priests of all persuasions being blackmailed and humiliated, and both ‘Sex & Fury’ and ‘The Great Chase’ (1975) feature their heroines squaring off against corrupt, knife-wielding nuns. Even when the storyline doesn’t allow for any explicit reiteration of this theme, Suzuki, like Ken Russell, always seems to find room for this personal bugbear of his: in ‘Lynch Law Classroom’, Miki Sugimoto’s character is “the boss with the cross”, whilst the best sequence in the otherwise religion-free ‘Girl Boss: Revenge’ finds Reiko Ike attacking a yakuza boss with a crucifix-shaped flick-knife.

This all leads on of course to discussing ‘School of the Holy Beast’, perhaps Suzuki’s best known film for many in the West, although to be honest, I don’t have much to say about it right now, simply because I haven’t seen it since that aforementioned cinema screening all those years ago, and I don’t remember much about it beyond an all-pervasive feeling of sado-masochismic confinement and a strong blue & red colour scheme. Neither ‘nunsploitation’ or ‘women in chains’ movies are really my thing, so I’m not terribly enthusiastic about the idea of revisiting it, although I have a DVD-rip on hand somewhere that I’ll probably get around to at some point.

In the mid-‘70s, as the productivity of the Japanese popular film industry plummeted, Suzuki played a role in Toei’s post-‘Streetfighter’ shift toward making martial arts & pure action films aimed at an international market, providing characteristically barmy scripts for Sister Streetfighter (1974) and the surely-that-title-can’t-be-literal? Sonny Chiba vehicle ‘Karate Bullfighter’ (1977).

In 1975, he moved a little bit closer to the mainstream with ‘The Great Chase’, a ludicrous action-fest in which ‘Sister Streetfighter’ star Etsuko Shihomi plays a champion racing driver who is also a master-of-disguise secret agent on the trail of an international drug gang. I actually watched this one a few weeks ago, and whilst I think it is categorically impossible for a film with that plotline to fail to be a whole lot of fun, somehow it never quite gets it together to become as great as it rightfully should be. It still features a few outstanding moments of full-on Norifumi craziness that I won’t spoil for you here, and rips along at the director’s usual breakneck pace, but at the same time, the standard of his filmmaking seems to have slipped a lot in comparison to the masterpieces of just a couple of years earlier, and audience interest and suspense frequently evaporates into a mass of “y’know, this shit just makes no sense whatsoever”-style sloppiness. A B+ movie where it should have been an A+, if you get my drift, which is unfortunate for Shihomi, because she is AWESOME in this, and really deserved to be a bigger  international star, if only she’d got the breaks.

In the second half of the decade, Suzuki’s energies were largely ploughed into another of his creations, the Torakku Yarō (rough translation: ‘Truck Rascals’) series of comedies, which proved one of Toei’s most lucrative hits during this difficult period. More mainstream that anything else the director had done up to this point, these movies star yakuza film icon Bunta Sugawara and comedian Shinichiro Sawai as a pair of roughneck dudes travelling around Japan in garishly decorated articulated trucks. I’m not really sure what else happens, but one suspects that ‘hilarity’ probably ensues, with the kind of puerile antics seen in the first halves of the Sukeban movies perhaps taking precedence. Norifumi directed ten of ‘em between 1975 and 1979, anyhow.

If 1979 however, perhaps tiring of light-weight comedy, he flew way back in the opposite direction with the notorious ‘Star of David: Beautiful Girl Hunting’, a serial killer / rape n’ torture themed movie that holds legendary status amongst fans of that sort of extreme fare, although again, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to back away from it mumbling my usual “um.. sorry, I just don’t really like that kind of thing..” excuses.

Suzuki continued to write and direct intermittently through the ‘80s, with late career highlights including another Chiba / Shihomi actioner ‘Roaring Fire’ (1982), and ‘Shogun’s Ninja’ (1980), also with Chiba & Shihomi, his contribution to the brief vogue for all-star wuxia-style historical fantasy movies kicked off by Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘The Shogun’s Samurai’ in 1978. (I have this one on a bootleg DVD multi-pack, in a cropped, dubbed form so horrible I can scarcely bear to watch it.)

Norifumi-san’s last film as director was the little-known ‘Bimbari High School’, which appeared in 1990, and which, in a nice bit of circle-closing synchronicity, was produced by his fellow bad boy of Japanese cinema, Koji Wakamatsu – a heart-warming example perhaps of the commercial meeting the avant garde, united by a joint love of sex, violence and radical fervour.

By this point, I hope I’ve gone some way toward demonstrating what an absolute legend of crazed cinema Norifumi Suzuki was, and how widely the influence of his legacy can be felt (for better or for worse), both in Japan and elsewhere. For reasons outlined above, I think we can probably assume he wasn’t a man who held much of a belief in the afterlife, nor placed a great deal of value on peace and tranquillity, so let’s instead perhaps hope he’s now enjoying an explosive, kick-ass, kinky sex-filled eternity somewhere out there in the cosmic firmament. R.I.P.V., perhaps?

---

“As far as movies go, I don't think they're built to last for posterity. And that's exactly what gives movies their value. Because they're in total sync with the era in which they were created. So... I think they're similar to fireworks. All they have to do is linger in the minds of those who saw them.

In my case, they're no masterpieces, so I never thought there'd be people still watching 10, 20 years later. Never crossed my mind! Still, I guess you could say... how should I put it? When you set out to create something, of course the process of making it is enjoyable in itself, but you have to ask yourself, Just what does it mean to be human? Or...what makes us go on living? And that's what I always tried to keep in mind whenever I made a film. And when you come right down to it, is life something that's worth living? That's what it all boils down to. Always. And the answer is yes, it is worth living. No matter how wretched that life may be.”

THINK PINK, Round II: Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counter-attack(Norifumi Suzuki, 1971)

Putting on make up in pale neon light rouses my blood

A beautiful flower in Nerikan secretly finds her own way

Only with her beauty… Sukeban Blues

The night in Nanka is cluttered with chaotic flowers

The battle flower blossoms to fight all her foes in the world

Only with her beauty… Sukeban Blues

Between 1971 and 1974, Norifumi Suzuki directed about a dozen pinky violence-related films for Toei*, putting him very much in the driving seat of this short-lived genre, at least in terms of its sleazier and crazier ‘70s incarnation. Given the director’s seemingly all-consuming obsession with dysfunctional sexual weirdness, one could legitimately raise concerns about leaving the guy in charge of a laundry room, let alone a whole cinematic sub-genre, but, four decades down the line, we can hopefully at least enjoy the chaos that resulted.

The first of four Suzuki-directed entries in the ‘Girl Boss’ series, ‘Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack’ is actually one of his earliest shots at the genre, but, though somewhat light on the vengeance and bloodshed side of things, it still manages to deliver just about everything else you could ask of a wild & woolly pinky violence adventure, in industrial strength quantities.

In keeping with many other sukeban movies, the emphasis here is very much on celebration of the hippie/outlaw lifestyle – a kind of hyper-caffinated exploitation version of the previous generation’s ‘sun tribe’ films, but even further removed from reality. Whilst Western movies of this ilk usually purport to represent a kind of “torn from today’s headlines” realism (with an accompanying moral sting), Japanese culture was under no such illusions, with films such as this happily acknowledging that their characters are totally unreal figures living a life of promiscuous sex and comic book mayhem, presumably allowing the devious girl-gangers and long-haired, devil-may-care bikers herein to become irresistible escapist fantasy figures for male and female viewers alike.

Suzuki helpfully signals this by staging the action in a deliberately ‘flat’, cartoonish style, lining up characters on screen like bowling pins and using their exaggerated reactions to move from one set-piece to another at a frenetic pace, allowing for a constant stream of zany incident that leaves us in little doubt as to the director’s tongue-in-cheek intentions. And let’s be glad he keeps his tongue where we can see it, because, this being a Suzuki film, it’s naturally crammed with sordid antics guaranteed to alternately enrage, offend and astound any well-adjusted individuals who find themselves accidently watching ‘Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack’ of an evening.

The promise of casual sex is ever-present in these ‘Girl Boss’ flicks, with the female characters agreeing to sleep with men at the drop of a hat, offering a taste of paradise to sweating, cowardly salarymen or a good night in the sack to the slightly more appealing young bikers or yakuza… provided they can turn a profit on the exchange. In fact, the code adhered to by the film’s inexplicably named ‘Athens Gang’ strictly forbids members from “dating or being manipulated by one particular man”, and women who refuse to use their sexuality for personal gain, or else harbour dreams of a conventional, monogamous relationship, are treated as fools or neophytes throughout.

Suzuki of course can always be relied upon to go further and get crazier with this material than anyone else on the block, and the #1 jaw-dropping exploitation highlight here is undoubtedly the infamous ‘bike fuck’ sequence, wherein the film’s (male) biker gang – perhaps inspired by the cover of Flower Travellin’ Band’s debut album, perhaps not – decide to race their machines naked as the lord intended, but this time with their ladies (mostly Athens Gang members, in a curious deviation from their ‘no profit/no sex’ philosophy) strapped on beneath them. The starting line is set and the rules are simple: stop when you come, and the last one motoring is the winner! What more of a perfectly ridiculous, OTT exploitation sequence could you possibly ask for!? It’s all in good fun too (well, I thought it was pretty fun at least), but, as mentioned, there is no shortage of other material here that sets out purely to offend.

If you get past the opening twenty minutes – during which a teenage girl is forced to break her hymen with her fingers as a gang initiation rite – you might think there’s not much more the film can throw at you, but for sheer I-can’t-fucking-believe-this nastiness, it’s hard to beat the later sub-plot in which an ‘uppity’ pop idol who ignores her former friends pays rather severely for her assumed transgressions when the gang get their yakuza allies to ambush her in a lift and brutally gang rape her. Objectionable enough in itself, this scene attains jaw-dropping heights of crassness by accompanying the action with a jaunty, swanny-whistle based party tune, and when we cut straight to a bar where the girls are celebrating the violation and subsequent ruined career of their rival, the combined effect is unbelievable – an astoundingly tasteless bit of business, even by the shaky standards of a Toei pinky violence movie.

As is usually the case in these PV flicks though, Suzuki seems determined to have his cake and eat it as regards the film’s approach to its female characters, balancing out such horribly exploitative moments with a solid, pro-female emotional core that remains weirdly convincing in spite of all the outrages that surround it. As noted, the ‘Athens Gang’ live according to a strict set of rules that not only governs their sexual behaviour, but also encourages them to avoid falling under the influence of men and to strive for “power, courage and strength” through their sisterhood (look closely and you’ll see that the gang’s cramped apartment hang-out is decorated with pictures of armed revolutionary fighters). The gang’s current boss and the instigator of their code (Reiko Ike, natch) didn’t sign off on the aforementioned rape scheme, and it is this that leads her into a conflict with returning former boss Jun (played as a total bad-ass by Teruo Ishii regular Yukie Kagawa) that dominates much of the film’s run time. Ike confesses to her second in command (Miki Sugimoto) that she was driven to reject conventional society and join a gang after being raped as a young girl, and, one by one, several of her comrades reveal similar tales of grief, allowing for some moments of genuine catharsis that are hard to write off entirely.

As you might imagine, this sort of thing makes for a movie that is wildly uneven in tone, and the waters are muddied further when things veer heavily into yakuza territory for a whole other male-dominated plotline that plays like a pastiche of one of Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Battles Without Honour & Humanity’ movies, with Hawaiian shirted thugs facing off all over the place as whisky is gulped, teeth are spat out and dearly-held principles are abandoned. (I was quite surprised to see Tôru Abe, one of Japan’s most respected actors, popping up as a yakuza boss, but actually a quick look at his CV reveals that he paid the rent with cameos in a number of sukeban and PV-related movies in the early ‘70s.) “Without money, honour and humanity can be lost in a second” one character opines over a glass of Johnny Walker, as a highly Fukasaku-esque tale of old-fashioned, principled yakuza being ploughed under by brute economics proceeds to unfold.

All of which strikes me as pretty curious to be honest, given that, although he’d made a few lesser known crime movies up to this point, Fukasaku’s game-changing ‘Battles..’ series didn’t even BEGIN until two years after this movie came out, which makes me uncertain quite what Suzuki was riffing on here, but, well… my knowledge of Japanese cinema being what it is, I’ll leave any further speculation to the better-informed amongst you. Just thought I’d throw that out there.

You won’t have much time to ponder such matters whilst ‘Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack’ is actually in progress mind you, as Suzuki somehow manages to also cram in a hefty dose of parental melodrama, enough bawdy behaviour to fuel the scripts for several ‘Porkys’ sequels, masses of gratuitous dirtbike racing footage, a musical interlude featuring what appears to be a transvestite or transsexual club singer, a devious plan involving blackmailing the head of a pharmaceutical company to provide raw materials for a hyper-addictive new street drug, and, well… you get the idea. Frankly how he manages to crow-bar so much STUFF into an 80 minute run-time is one of cinema’s great mysteries - it’s like that clowns-emerging-from-the-car trick, only infinitely more entertaining.

I guess the final, plot-heavy quarter of an hour drags slightly, and the dirt road shoot-out conclusion is rather po-faced and ineffective, but after a film that’s given us this much joyous mayhem & taboo-smashing craziness, such failings are hard to criticise too much. Provided as you can put your ‘morally upstanding member of the human race’ badge aside for a while and roll with the punches, ‘Queen Bee’s Counter-Attack’ is yet another perfect, mindless slice of everything that makes early ‘70s Japanese exploitation movies so exhilarating.

*Not that stopped him also finding time to fit in such classy-sounding pinku productions as ‘Tokugawa Sex Ban: Lustful Lord’ and ‘Modern Porno Tale: Inherited Sex Mania’ during these years. Bit of an autobiographical slant going on there, Nori…?

Mp3 > The Sukeban Blues

Think Pink: Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom (Norifumi Suzuki, 1973)

“A cold wind is blowing
Not a soul on campus
The shadows cast are full of lies
That’s me in my school uniform

Days of songs are so far away
They’ll never come again for me”

If you’re looking for a demonstration of what makes Japanese exploitation cinema from the early ‘70s so unique, consider the fact that not only did they routinely make movies called things like ‘Terrifying Girls High School: Lynch Law Classroom’, but that, after watching them, you’re often able to sit back and think “yes, on reflection, that would seem to be an entirely appropriate name for this particular film”.

Certainly, renowned maniac Norifumi Suzuki wastes no time in letting us know just how terrifying life at Kanto’s ‘School of Hope for Girls’ is, throwing us straight into an alarming, horror movie-esque sequence that sees the school’s fascistic ‘Disciplinary Committee’ clad in red rubber gloves and surgical masks, using equipment in the science lab to drain the blood from a half-naked victim, calculating how long she’ll be able to remain conscious as she slowly bleeds to death.

Thus we’re introduced to the shock troops of the film’s institutional villains, but frankly the three new transfer students who comprise our heroines are scarcely much less terrifying. Denim-clad Noriko (Miki Sugimoto) – called ‘The Boss with the Cross’ on account of her crucifix pendant - actually manages to get arrested whilst en-route to the school, kicking a cop in the balls as her attempts to steal a car outside the train station. Cowgirl-attired Remi the Razor meanwhile does.. well, exactly what you’d expect really, landing a transfer to Kanto after cutting up a bunch of hooligans in a street brawl, and bisexual Kyoko (“I only do it with guys to wash out the taste, have sex with me once and I’ll drive you insane”, she announces within her first few minutes on-screen) finds herself in hot water after being caught masturbating a truckdriver as he crashes into a police checkpoint.

Plot-wise, ‘Lynch Law Classroom’ quickly establishes itself a variation on yr standard Women In Prison set-up, with a corrupt, authoritarian institution, bungling, ineffectual principal, scheming vice-principal, sadistic guards (in the form of the aforementioned Disciplinary Committee). Gratuitous shower scenes, cat fights and demeaning initiation rituals are all present and correct. Suzuki never lets things trundle along dull WIP rails for long though, concentrating on an astounding array of exploitation set-pieces, taking in lesbian toilet seduction, genital light bulb torture, boob electrocution, and one particularly memorable sequence in which a girl is prevented from going to the toilet until she wets herself in public.

After my review of ‘Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs’ last week, you might anticipate some tut-tutting from this corner, but remarkably, Suzuki just about manages to get away with it all I think. Rather than throwing this stuff around just for the sake of sheer cruelty, he invests it with a kind of grotesque, anarchic humour that renders these scenes freaky and blackly hilarious, rather than merely offensive. At a push, you could maybe even compare Suzuki’s approach here to early John Waters - whilst still unrepentantly prurient and gratuitous, he seems less concerned with providing unwholesome titillation for his audience, and more with simply getting a reaction out of people any way he can. Not content to merely introduce these icky concepts, he seems determined to milk them for as much visceral impact as possible, handheld camera spinning crazily, zooming in for hair-raising close-ups as victims struggle, scream and generally freak-out, often to the accompaniment of incongruous action-scene funk-rock.

Although the film’s universe is pretty sketchy at times (for instance, the way the girls seem to be able to leave the confines of the school when they feel like it and even have access to vehicles, money etc., but nonetheless spend most of their time hanging around in the playground in approved school uniform, is never quite explained), one gets the feeling that any concept of ‘coherence’ was wisely left eating dust as Suzuki simply raced from outrageous sequence to the next, and, rejoicing in their own ridiculousness, the results are really something to behold.

A harder sell for Western viewers perhaps is the film’s middle section, wherein our heroines collaborate with a suave blackmailer guy to try to bring down the school’s top brass by means of a series of ‘honeypot’ stings, wherein the men (who are naturally all lecherous comedy bozos of one kind or another) are coerced into having sex with the pupils, photos and tape recordings of their shameful depredations subsequently ruining their careers. As well as introducing us to the uncomfortable notion that young women don’t really mind being violated by disgusting fat men as long as it serves their eventual goals, these Porkys-goes-to-hell style japes are just a bit predictable and repetitive, causing the otherwise lightning fast pacing to sag somewhat.

Fear not though, sukeban fans, as, as if realising things are starting to drag a bit, Suzuki orders 20 CCs of Reiko Ike, stat, and verily she appears, gate-crashing the classroom on her motorbike as the leader of a chapter of rival Kanto girl gangs with a score to settle with Noriko. As joint queens of the pinky violence era at Toei, it seems to have been written into their contracts that Ike and Sugimoto have to square off for a knife fight in every film they appeared in together, and, well, say what you like… their showdown certainly got me back on-side.

Somewhat surprisingly given his no holds barred approach to sleaze though, Suzuki’s more serious anti-authoritarian agenda creeps up on us with a certain degree of subtlety amid the mayhem. About an hour in, the corrupt political big-shot who acts as the school’s patron takes a look at the school yearbook, and decides to rape Tomoko, the film’s pure-hearted, hard-working innocent girl. Despite what has gone before, this scene and the victim’s subsequent suicide are handled in a surprisingly restrained and harrowing fashion that not only seems to cast a dark reflection back on the more casual instances of sexual degradation we’ve seen earlier in the film, but also conveys an unmistakable feeling of genuine rage against a system that allows the wealthy and powerful to ruin the lives of those beneath them.

As the big-shot prepares for the arrival of his victim, he sits in tranquil ryokan surroundings, reading aloud from a passage in the ‘Compendium of the Law’ praising the Imperial family. Sparing us the gory details of the assault itself, Suzuki’s camera subsequently pulls away, zeroing in instead on the book, which has fallen open on a page detailing the sentencing of rapists.

Tomoko’s subsequent death (she hangs herself in a classroom) signals a definite shift in the film’s tone, as gross-out exploitation is increasingly sidelined in favour of a more tangible attack on institutional hypocrisy. Angry and disgusted at their friend’s fate, the pupils hold a vigil around her corpse and, led by Noriko, Remi and Kyoko, instigate a full scale insurrection against the powers that be, destroying the campus in a fit of rage, barricading the entrance gates and attacking riot police with rocks, water cannons and wooden clubs – a breath-taking outburst of anarchy, like some crazed Japanese exploitation take on Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If..’.

In the closing minutes of the riot, a Japanese flag burns on an overturned limousine as Reiko Ike, clad in a red mini-dress, beats the crap out of a policeman with a giant wooden pole, and, finally overwhelmed, the girls laugh defiantly, sharing gestures of solidarity as they’re carted off to an even sterner detention centre. Hell yeah! Right on, comrades! Every school you trash takes us one step closer to a world in which delinquent gang girls can go about their business unmolested by weaselly comic relief men with Hitler moustaches. And that, I think, is a cause we can all get behind.

I suppose it should go without saying by this point that ‘Terrifying Girls High School: Lynch Law Classroom’ comes with a ‘NOT FOR THE EASILY OFFENDED’ warning in ten foot high neon letters, but beyond that, it’s an unruly, punk-ass masterpiece that anyone with a taste for the crazier end of world cinema owes it to themselves to check out.

Mp3> Ballad of the Lynch Law Classroom

Think Pink: Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (Yukio Noda, 1974)

"The city’s lights must strain you
You must long for your mother’s breast
Oh, you poor lost puppy
If you lose faith, it’s all over

The world is filled with such sadness
It is difficult to keep walking towards the future
“Someday, happiness will come to me”
I believe this in my heart and live on"

At completely the other end of the spectrum from the genteel ‘Wandering Ginza Butterfly’, we have ‘Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs’, adapted from the long-running manga created by Toru Shinohara. The Zero Woman stories centre on the character of Rei (here portrayed by Miki Sugimoto), a renegade ex-cop/assassin whose raison d’etre is hunting down rapists and other extremely bad men, posing as an innocent victim and then executing them when they least expect it, often by means of her trademark red handcuffs, which she manages to use as a kind of midair decapitation device. All of which could be seen as potentially jolly and female-affirmative stuff, were it not for the employment of the old ‘have your cake and eat it’ exploitation strategy of deferring this violent payoff until the villains have already given her poor body a good going over – a tradition that is recreated to a somewhat unhappy extent in Yukio Noda’s film.

The plot line here – which bares more than a passing resemblance to Umberto Lenzi’s excellent poliziotteschi movie ‘Almost Human’ – sees the daughter of an influential politician kidnapped by a gang of feral thugs. Rei is thus extracted from her prison cell and offered a deal by the corrupt cops who want to hush the whole thing up. Her mission: to infiltrate the gang, rescue the girl and kill everyone else, in exchange for her freedom.

And so the scene is set for… well, for about ninety minutes of utter psychosis, to be honest. By far the most violent and misanthropic entry I’ve seen in the ‘pinky violence’ cycle thus far, ‘Red Handcuffs’ seems to blur the boundaries somewhat with the nastier rape/sadism-focused films that began to predominate at studios like Nikkatsu from the mid ‘70s onwards, its promising opening as a hard-boiled crime story swiftly becoming little more than an excuse to fill the screen with as much cruelty and depravity as possible.

The film is full of sex and nudity, absolutely none of it consensual, and in fact nothing approaching a normal human relationship is portrayed at any point. Aside from Sugimoto’s dead-eyed avenger, every character on screen is either a depraved, hideous beast or a voiceless victim - this is pure exploitation movie nihilism, thrilling and repulsive in equal measure.

And I can roll with that to a certain extent - certainly the kind of unpleasantness showcased here is comparable to that seen in the work of Shunya Ito or Norifumi Suzuki, whose films I love – but what nixed my enjoyment of ‘Red Handcuffs’ wasn’t only the lack of human feeling, but also a crucial lack of content. As a drama, the movie fails to really make a connection with the viewer even on the basic rape/revenge level usually favoured in films like this, and as a crime story, it just plain doesn’t work.

Having infiltrated the gang’s hideout and proved her ability as a fearless killer by promptly filleting their sole female member after a botched lesbian rape attempt, why does Rei not only let the rest of them live, but actually collaborate with their plans and give them advice, meekly putting up with them as they turn against her, torture and brutally rape her, then drag her halfway across the country on the run from the cops, as they perpetrate further outrages against innocent civilians…? Why only THEN – in far less salubrious circumstances – does she finally get around to dealing with them..? Because otherwise the story would only have stretched to about forty minutes, presumably. With all tension and narrative drive thus diffused, and with no particular goal to be achieved or point to be made, the film basically just descends (or ascends, depending on your point of view) into a senseless parade of increasingly exaggerated mayhem.

And it pains me to say this, but Miki Sugimoto’s performance scarcely helps matters either. She’s a fantastic presence in a lot of girl-gang focused pinky violence flicks, but here, carrying the whole movie without an ensemble cast to back her up, she just seems a bit out of her depth. Whereas Meiko Kaji saw through the various abuses her character suffers in the ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ films with a look of burning hatred in her eyes, Sugimoto seems unable to move beyond her default expression of vague dissatisfaction, meaning that her character seems to shrug off gang-rape and torture with an attitude of ‘whatever, all part of the job’, re-emerging five minutes later looking completely unscathed. Maybe that’s just the nature of the Zero Woman character, or maybe I’m just mistakenly applying Western sensibilities about such things, but still… not really a nice message to leave people with, y’know?

Not that ‘a nice message’ is something anyone but me would be stupid enough to expect from a movie as thoroughly fucked in the head as ‘Red Handcuffs’, mind you. And with that in mind, I don’t want to do a total burn on the film, because as a pure, visceral experience it’s still pretty damn impressive. Realised with a kind of fast-moving, shot-from-the-hip stylistic flair, and with characteristically brilliant Toei photography still strongly in evidence (if only more Western b-movies from 1974 looked half this good..), the closing car chase / gun battle sequence packs an incredible punch, utilising dutch angles, freeze frames, montage cutting, beserk stunt work and absolutely ridiculous quantities of gore to ensure that, as a piece of low budget action cinema, the last few reels just plain kick ass.

And, horrible, one dimensional characters though they might be, the criminal gang certainly pull their weight as all-purpose avatars of cinematic destruction, fucking, killing or blowing up everything in their path in about ten seconds flat as they plough on relentlessly toward a suicidal showdown with the police. Gang leader Nakahara – I’m not 100% sure on the actor who plays him, but he looks pretty familiar - totally steals the show, his descent into foaming-at-the-mouth homicidal mania played to such comical extremes that he makes Tomas Milian’s equivalent character in ‘Almost Human’ look like a refined man of letters by comparison. The taciturn bad-ass second in command guy – mirror shades, denim cap, evil grin – is great too, spending the first half of the movie whittling female figures out of wood with his hunting knife, and most of the second half holding it to the throat of the kidnap victim as he pumps her full of dope, occasionally pausing to reiterate the fact that he don’t trust no one.

Searching in vain for a bit of depth amid all this mess, there is at least a touch of the same criticism of post-war Western cultural imperialism that can be found in films like Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter in evidence in 'Red Handcuffs'. Fleeing to that ubiquitous Japanese movie showdown location, the abandoned US navel base, the gang promptly piss all over an American ‘Urination Prohibited’ sign and invade the privacy of some Japanese people who seem to be living in a American style suburban home, reciting stilted English dialogue for a production of ‘Romeo & Juliet’.

During the finale, Nakahara – a Japanese/American half-breed – is even presented to some extent as the tragic result of cultural miscegenation. “My mother was a prostitute here..”, he remarks to nobody in particular as he cowers in the ruins of the US base, a brief photo montage seeking to show us how his troubled, rootless upbringing inevitably led him to a life of sociopathic criminality. But such blunt commentary seems pretty crass compared to the more complex treatment given to East/West co-dependence in some of the better pinky violence films, and as an attempt to try to invest ‘Red Handcuffs’ with some sort of a point, it’s too little too late.

One has to admire the technical skill, crazed audacity and sheer unrelenting nastiness of ‘Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs’, and if pure, unfiltered exploitation is your bag you’ll probably dig the hell out of it. But, like the psychopathic characters it portrays, there’s an emptiness at the heart of the film that’s cold, man, real cold, and I didn’t really go for that.

Mp3> Closing Theme (Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs)