1971, Japan. Starring Reiko Oshida, Masumi Tachibana, Yukie Kagawa, Meiko Tsudoi, Yumiko Katayama, Yoko Ichiji, Reiko Maruyama, Junzaburo Ban, Tonpei Hidari, Nobuo Kaneko, Tsunehiko Watase. Directed by Kazuhiko Yamaguchi. Buy it now from Amazon.com.

Man, it's amazing what a little foul health can do to your burning desire to review somewhat obscure girl gang movies in which Japanese chicks in bell bottoms show off their boobs and stab chumps with switchblades.

I don't get sick very often, as my strict diet of fruit, salmon, whey protein, and hard liquor in excessive quantities keeps me pretty fit. And I was on an even stricter diet during the World Cup that consisted of hot wings and a couple pints of Newcastle every single day during lunch. During that time, I increased my base lifting weight by fifteen pounds, lost eight pounds of fat and an inch off my gut, and awoke early every morning with an abundance of energy and zest for life. So despite what some of you may think, my vigorous and healthy lifestyle keeps me in good shape.

However, the past week saw the temperature in my office average right around 55 degrees. As a Southern man with a passionate lust for warm temperature and the blazing kiss of the sun, this turned out to be rather on the chilly side. Coupled with plenty of rain and a lapse in my lunch diet on account of the World Cup advancing to the stage where there weren't games every afternoon, these conditions conspired to wreak havoc with the back of my throat, and while I successfully fend off the occasional virus, there's only so much I can do to combat a simple irritation of the body that results in one's protective mucous glands kicking into high gear, resulting in a stuffy nose and an inflamed throat.

A shot of whiskey does wonders to soothe such inflammations, but as my place of employment is narrow-minded and backward and generally bigoted against my traditional backwoods remedies, I was forced to forego the bottle and rely instead on the nauseating, sweet-and-sour-sauce colored poison known as Dayquil. Disgusting, but it got the job done and made me feel nearly as good as a shot of Wild Turkey (not to mention eliciting the same basic facial contortions upon downing the shot). To date, however, I have resisted the urge to see what happens when I mix the licorice nastiness of NyQuil with the licorice goodness of absinthe -- but I don't think that's a temptation I can resist for too terribly much longer.

Still, Dayquil highs, sore throat and stuffiness lows, and a couple looming deadlines at work meant that my initial plans to kick off Girls Gone Wild month were foiled, and instead I spent the first ten days of July sitting on the couch with a tissue shoved up my nose, watching England blow it and Italy fake-foul their way to victory, then being stunned as two of the top contenders for winning the Tour de France were suspended from the race (opening the door wide for my big-ass fur-coat-and-cycling-shorts-combo wearing man, Floyd Landis, to win it all this year) as I struggled in a medicinal haze to proofread directions for configuring one's Windows 2000 machine to access the university network via dial-up modem. As much as it pains me to say it, writing up Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess got lost in the madness.

But here I sit now, health irritations receding, the World Cup naught but a memory of French guy headbutting some mouthy Italian in the chest, and the Tour de France on a rest day. My deadlines still loom, and indeed their shadow hangs heavier than ever and I am, as all good writers tend to be, woefully behind schedule in completing my assigned tasks. But sometimes, you just need a break from the grind, and on a day like today, there's not much I can afford to do other than blow off a little artistic steam by finally launching Girls Gone Wild month with a review of the aforementioned operatic girl gang opus.

I should probably kick things off with a concise history of Japanese girl gang movies, of the "pinky violence" film, and of violent Japanese youth subcultures in general. But the truth of the matter is, I wasted something like 600 words already telling you about my stuffy nose and taking thinly veiled swipes at the drama queen nature of the Italian World Cup soccer team (my friend Jon, whose veins coarse with the garlic-rich blood of the Italian strain, prefers to describe them more complimentary as "like watching a Puccini opera"). And honestly, what's more relevant to the discussion of a Japanese girl gang pinky violence movie: a discussion of the roots and history, cinematic and social, of the genre, or my random thoughts about Italian soccer and congestion medicine? Anyway, we touched briefly and in our typically half-assed fashion on the subject in our review of Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, so I'll refer you to that review for starters (not that it has much to offer), and Patrick Macias, one of our favorite bloggers and the author of the entertaining survey of Japanese pop cinema, Tokyoscope, is apparently fervently writing a book on the subject as we speak, so I'll leave it to the man who is actually getting paid to do research to do the research, and you shall have to wait with sweating palms for him to complete what will undoubtedly be yet another highly entertaining book if you want the whole story.

And now, having established that I'm not going to spend much time on the history of the pinky violence films, allow me to spend some time on the history of pinky violence films, as well as a brief history of everything from Takakura Ken and the Abashiri Prison films to Nikkatsu Studio to psychotic director Teruo Iishi. So I am way behind schedule, but at least I'm doing my best to give you your money's worth.

Things in the Japanese film industry were chugging along during the 1960s. The gradual erosion of restrictive post-war regulation of the Japanese film industry by occupying American forces (samurai and yakuza flicks were banned, as was just about anything that would "inspire the Japanese spirit") meant that writers and directors were coming out of a long creative hibernation and finally getting to flex their brains again. Inoshiro Honda and Toho Studios were cranking out a steady stream of highly enjoyable fantasy, science fiction, and monster movies built on the foundation of the enduring success of Godzilla. Akira Kurosawa was making movies that no one would watch until Americans started discovering them in the 1970s. Takakura Ken and Akira Takarada were burning up screens as Japan's two biggest matinee idols. Japan had yet to befoul the world by making M.D. Geist. All in all, not a bad time to be a film fan.

As Japan continued to distance itself from the wreckage of World War II and rapidly match the prosperity of the United States, more and more people started buying and watching television sets. As it had done in the United States some years before, this trend sent the movie industry into a panic, and not without good reason. Profits declined, attendance dropped, and back then, they couldn't blame it on Internet downloading. The solution many film companies came up with was simple enough, and matches in many ways what cable channels like HBO have done: if you need to compete with broadcast television, do so by packing your features with the kind of stuff you can't put on TV. This means, as you can guess, more sex, violence, and people calling each other "cocksucker."

Suffice to say that in the 1970s, cinema censorship laws became increasingly lax both as a way to help salvage the industry and simply because the natural trend after severe restriction is usually toward greater leniency, Japanese studios started cramming more violence and tits into their movie. In other words, they started making the sort of films about which Teleport City can get enthusiastic. Shintoho opened the gateway during the late 50s and 60s by continuously pushing the envelope on crime and action films centered around female protagonists and seedy environments. Nikkatsu Studio blazed the trail with a series of films that became known as "Roman Porno" films -- though disappointingly, these are not a bunch of Japanese movies about decadent ancient Romans; it was just a shortening of the phrase "Romantic Porno," because saving yourself the second it takes you to pronounce the one additional syllable in "romantic" adds up to several seconds over a lifetime, or several minutes if you are in the industry and thus more likely to be saying "romantic porno."

Nikkatsu was one of Japan's first film studios. During World War II, the consolidation toward the war effort of Japan's limited resources resulted in Nikkatsu becoming part of Daiei Studios, probably most famous to readers of Teleport City as the eventual home of Gamera. After the war, Nikkatsu returned to its independent status, but Daiei got to keep all the production facilities. Nikkatsu had to start from scratch, and they financed the rebuilding of their studio by relying heavily on distributing foreign films rather than making their own. Audiences that still had to deal with the aftermath of the war looming outside their door (if indeed they still had doors) were ravenous for any form of escape, and American administrators were much happier to see Japanese audiences flocking to American westerns and action films rather than reviving their own films.

When Nikkatsu had built up the capital it needed to finance the establishment of new facilities and begin production again, it opted to look to the foreign films it had been distributing with great success as inspiration for their own films, rather than returning as most studios had to the standard set of pre-war genres (some of which, as mentioned, were banned by Allied administrators). Thus, American and French new wave films became the models Nikkatsu would look to, which meant the resulting films were considerably different from anything else being made in Japan at the time.

The new Nikkatsu was built around a core of stars, and it began attracting the attention of filmmakers who were interested in experimenting with film and making movies that other, more traditional studios, weren't willing to chance. Thus, Nikkatsu soon became the home of people like the maverick director Seijun Suzuki, whose films were often so inventive and outlandish that even liberal Nikkatsu sought to reel him in by slashing his budgets and forbidding him to use color film stock -- a move that resulted in Suzuki making Branded to Kill, the most off-beat and cracked-in-the-head films in his repertoire (at least until he remade it as Pistol Opera).

Although well-respected now, Suzuki's films weren't exactly the sort of thing that could save a studio. Quite the opposite, frankly. As the film industry crisis grew more pressing throughout the 60s, Nikkatsu decided that it was time to ramp up the nudity. Thus the birth of Roman Porno.

The term was meant to differentiate the Nikkatsu films from straightforward pornos, which have always existed in the underground and, during the 1970s, were really starting to make their mark on society in a much bolder and more mainstream fashion. The Nikkatsu films, by contrast, still boasted a budget, recognizable actors, and even respectable writers and directors. Of course, they were still sleazy melodramas full of gratuitous nudity, too, and that's what made the m special. The Nikkatsu films tended to explore increasingly bizarre sexual territory, delving frequently into the world of S&M and rape. They were also cheap and easy to make and helped keep the studio afloat when so many other, less daring (or sleazy, or opportunistic, if you prefer) studios were tanking in the great industry collapse that plagued the 70s. A similar crash took out the British film industry around the same time (Hammer Studios being one of the most famous casualties), and the attempt to salvage operations by increasing the levels of sex and violence in the films was pretty much a world-wide phenomenon.

Also badly in need of an injection of life, Toei Studios decided to jump on the sex and violence bandwagon, though they tended to take a decidedly different approach than the Roman Porno movies of the infamous Nikkatsu. Toei was doing well with a variety of action-oriented films, so they decided that they should stick with the action movies, but jam them with more nudity and even greater amounts of violence. Thus was born the pinky violence film. Once Toei established the framework, plenty of other studios followed it. Even Nikkatsu flirted with it when they made their Stray Cat Rock films with Meiko Kaji before committing themselves almost entirely to Roman Porno movies. These pinky violence movies tended to exist within an established number of settings: they were either turn-of-the-century female samurai/gambler movies (Sex and Fury, Female Yakuza Tale, and the Lady Snowblood movies starring Meiko Kaji and based on manga by Kazuo Koike -- the man who brought Lone Wolf and Cub to the world) derived from less sexual but scarcely less violent precursors like the Crimson Bat and Red Peony Gambler films; or they were "girl gang" or "juvenile delinquent girl" (sukeban) movies. From time to time, a women-in-prison film would get thrown into the mix, the most famous being the Female Convict Scorpion movies starring Meiko Kaji (if you're going to watch Japanese exploitation films, you'd best get used to seeing her name).

For the most part, though, girl gangs ruled the roost, because they were easiest to film. They didn't require period sets or costumes. Directors could shoot guerilla-style at various locations around Japan, usually without worrying about casting extras or getting permits (which is why so many of these films -- Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess included -- feature shots of the characters walking down the street surrounded by onlookers gawking directly at them or into the camera). And you could make the same movie over and over with only a few tweaks to keep it interesting (this movie has a gang of girls just out of reform school; that movie has a biker gang; and so on).

What made these exploitation films interesting is...well, no. Tits and violence made them interesting. But what made them intellectually interesting is that they became the playground for a lot of inventive directors who felt the more traditional films hamstrung them and wouldn't allow them to explore wild new directing styles and story content. So amid the boobs and bloodshed, you often got films with highly creative and ground-breaking direction, as well as plots that tackled all sorts of subjects (violence against women, Japanese racism, war crimes, et cetera) still considered taboo in the Japanese mainstream. Sometimes the messages were there as cheap justification for the exploitation. Sometimes, the exploitation was there to make the message easier to express. Whatever the case, it made for some completely wild films that offer up all sorts of potential for discussion.

For the most part, these films remained unseen by all but a few hardened tape traders in the United States, who would suffer bad VHS dupes and no translation just for a chance to see the psychedelic madness of 1970s Japanese pop exploitation. Luckily, the relative cheapness of DVD over VHS, as well as an increasingly receptive group of Japanese studios (previously, they were notoriously antagonistic toward foreign distribution and charged insane prices to license their titles -- something anime companies still like to do), the hitherto untapped reservoirs of Japanese yakuza and pinky violence movies are finally seeing the light of day in the United States. For fans like me, the efforts of companies like HVE, Kino, Diskotec, and Panik House are enough to bring to the eye a sweet, sweet tear of joy. Finally, I have something other than the three-hundred different budget DVD versions of Sonny Chiba's Street Fighter and Legend of the Eight Samurai.

In 2006, Panik House released the only DVD besides Space Thunder Kids that I've purchased in the past year (Netflix and the purchase of a new car and thus new car payments have combined to quell my once lusty DVD buying habit): The Pinky Violence Collection. Collecting four notable girl gang movies (and one audio CD) into an eye-blistering hot pink package stuffed with liner notes from author Chris D. (author of Mavericks of Japanese Cinema), it was pretty easy for the set to convince me to part with my cash during one of those Deep Discount DVD sales.

Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess is the first of these films we will be sampling, although it turns out that while it is certainly a great film, it's not exactly what you might call indicative of the trend as a whole (neither, for that matter, was Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter). As with the Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, Worthless to Confess is part of a series of films that, to date, have only seen the one film released (when oh when do I get the rest of my Stray Cat Rock movies? I just can't get enough Meiko Kaji in a big, floppy hat like those psychedelic trolls used to wear). In the case of the Delinquent Girl Boss films, Worthless to Confess is the final in the series, though it would seem that, at the very least, this film is a self-contained adventure that has very little carried over from the earlier films. I don't know if the other three were more connected to one another, but the point here is that you really don't need to go into this film worried that you haven't seen the previous three, except in the capacity of really wanting to see the first three films because you figure they're probably pretty cool.

These Zubeko Bancho films were considerably less sleazy than most of the pinky violence films, and the women in them are treated with much greater kindness than you'd see in films like, oh let's say Terrifying Girl's High School. Unfortunately it's hard to make statements about th Zubeko Bancho series as a whole, having not seen the rest. There's not a lot of information floating around about them. I'm not a casual fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I also fall fairly short of "dedicated scholar." I guess I'm a lazy scholar. I haven't put forth the effort to track down and watch all the films in the series (I can't even find cast and credits list for the other movies. Hell, can't even find a complete list of titles for the series), so remember that the bold, sweeping statements I make are based pretty much entirely on seeing this one, final film in the series. What can't be gleaned from it has been cribbed from various liner notes and the scant other resources I managed to turn up.

I don't want to stray too far into the realm of plot synopsis, but I do want to lay out the opening scene of this film, as it sets a thematic tone for everything that comes after. We open on a group of juvenile delinquent girls at reform school movie night, where they are supposed to be suffering through a documentary about the flora and fauna of the Hokkaido region. However, the projectionist has been convinced by the girls that he should show one of Takakura Ken's Abashiri Prison films instead. As the girls go nuts over seeing yakuza matinee idol Takakura Ken leaping about in the Hokkaido snow, slicing chumps down with his trusty katana, prison officials try to figure out what kind of nature documentary this is. Once they figure out Hokkaido's Great Outdoors is actually one of the Abashiri Bangaichi movies, they pull the plug, resulting in a modest riot of shoe and panty flinging.

Opening with a salute to the Abashiri Prison series means rather a lot to this sort of film. The most obvious is the simple act of homage. During the 1960s, Takakura Ken was one of the biggest (perhaps the biggest) stars in Japan, thanks in large part to his frequent appearances as a noble yakuza fighting battles full of honor and humanity. The Abashiri Prison series was his long-running string of films that all seem to start with him as a yakuza freshly released from Abashiri Prison with visions of "going straight" only to get caught up in some sort of gangland turmoil so that the film can end with him going back to Abashiri Prison as some trumpet-heavy closing theme song wails in the background. I believe if you totaled all the films, Takakura Ken served 1,700 years in Abashiri Prison over the course of the series.

Like most movies that become pop culture phenomenon, the first Abashiri Prison film wasn't meant to be very much more than a quick, cheap yakuza film. But something about the movie and it's story of a man who proudly clings to the tradition of yakuza nobility and honor even as the world around him descends into cynicism resonated with young Japanese audiences, who perhaps saw it as a metaphor for Japan's struggle in the wake of World War II. Here, after year of waiting, was a film that grandly celebrated these mythical Japanese qualities. Folks ate it up, and a franchise was born.

Most of the Abashiri Prison films were directed by a guy named Teruo Ishii, who directed a series of sci-fi and crime films during the 50s and 60s. In 1965, he helmed Abashiri Prison, and suddenly he was one of the most successful directors in Japan. But since Japan didn't really embrace the auteur theory or create cults of personality around directors, you can't really say Ishii became a superstar. Still, he was successful enough to throw his weight around the studio a bit, and he followed up a successful string of Takakura Ken yakuza films by doing what any good director would do: going completely off the deep end and indulging in a career full of increasingly bizarre, sick, and twisted sex and violence films that include titles like The Joy of Torture, the still-banned Horror of a Deformed Man, Hell's Tattooers, and a couple Yakuza Punishment films. Ishii's film's pushed the envelope for the amount of deviant sex and weirdness a director could cram into his films, and his late 60s work definitely kicked down the door and made Nikkatsu's Roman Porno films viable.

Oddly enough when everyone was enjoying the fruits of the tolerance for perversion and sex that Ishii helped sow, Ishii himself opted to shift gears yet again, working primarily on a parade of Sonny Chiba karate films (including Street Fighter's Last Revenge, the superb Executioner, and Karate Inferno). In 1973, he contributed to the pinky violence trend by directing Female Yakuza Tale, a sequel to director Norifumi Suzuki's Sex and Fury (both starring Reiko Ike -- whose name you'll be seeing pretty much as often as Meiko Kaji's). Ishii remained sporadically active throughout the 80s and 90s before dying in August of 2005. While he may not have the name recognition of, say, Akira Kurosawa or Inoshiro Honda, you can't really fault a guy whose final film was titled Blind Beast vs. the Dwarf.

But during the 60s, the attention all focused on the star, and it was Takakura Ken and his movies that served as the template for yakuza films throughout the 1960s, until Kinji Fukasaku turned the genre upside down in Battles without Honor and Humanity, the film that dared postulate that maybe not all these yakuza guys were noble anti-heroes with swank theme songs; that many of them were, in fact, wretched scumbags and cowards. Curiously, the yakuza seemed as enthusiastic about this portrayal as they'd been by the Takaura Ken films of the previous decade, probably because as weasely and pathetic as most of the characters were, at the end of the day there was still Bunta Sugawara up there on the screen, standing tall and looking cool and letting all the junior yakuza types fancy they were like him rather than like the squealing, flailing goofballs that comprise most of the cast of characters.

Worthless to Confess definitely features more of the latter type of yakuza, though the girls in the movie are considerably more honorable than the gents, but where Kinji Fukasaku's films are relentless deconstructions of the yakuza myth, Worthless to Confess is more of a "between two worlds" look at yakuza who are undeniably like Fukasaku's cowardly, backstabbing scumbags but exist in a world that acknowledges the existence of the Takakura Ken yakuza movies that created (or at least helped perpetuate) the myth in the first place -- sort of like making a zombie movie set in a world where zombie movies exist. Ken represents the image to which the yakuza strive, while Kenji represents the reality of what they achieve. And somewhere caught in the middle of it all, the women in the movie are more Takakura Ken than the yakuza around them, and like the matinee idol, star Reiko Oshida lives a life that follows the Abashiri Prison pattern of getting out, trying to go straight, getting caught up in turmoil, and ultimately winding up right back in the same place you were at the beginning of the movie.

Oshida (who has very few film credits to her name, unfortunately, but was a member of the cast of Playgirl, a TV show about a cast of swingin' crime-fightin' chicks) plays Rika, a small-time delinquent serving a sentence in a women's reform school where she meets a variety of other inmates, including a woman named Midori (Yumiko Katayama, another Playgirl alumnus), whose boyfriend is a small-time yakuza punk (though like all small-time yakuza punks, he thinks he's a major player) and whose father, Muraki (yakuza film mainstay Junzaburo Ban, who was also in the Akira Kurosawa film Dodes'ka-den), is a kindly auto mechanic. When Rika gets out, she takes a job in the old man's garage and discovers that Midori is bleeding her father dry in an attempt to pay off her deadbeat boyfriend's ever-escalating gambling debts. The local yakuza are keen to see the guy get in so much debt that Midori will pressure her father to sell his garage, and Rika is keen to protect the old man and try to straighten Midori out. Needless to say, in order to do so, she'll have to reassemble the old gang from reform school.

Now the following may be a bit of an odd stretch anywhere but Teleport City, so please bear with me for a moment, and if the point I'm trying to make eventually caves in on itself and ends up making no sense at all, then please just regard this whole harebrained paragraph and move on to something more worthwhile ("something more worthwhile " not necessarily meaning the next paragraph). A while back, we reviewed a bunch of sleazy cheerleader sexploitation films (The Cheerleaders, Revenge of the Cheerleaders, and The Swingin' Cheerleaders -- oh, and goddamned H.O.T.S. but I was trying to forget about that one). Now, most of these movies offered little more than cheap titillation. H.O.T.S. didn't even offer that. The Swinging Cheerleaders, however, was directed by Jack Hill, who also directed a couple of our favorite Pam Grier movies (Foxy Brown and Coffy), as well as a whole slew of other grindhouse and drive-in theater staples like Switchblade Sisters, The Big Doll House, and Spider Baby. While Jack Hill did indeed ply his trade in the realm of exploitation cinema, he also brought a certain flare to the material that lifted his films several notches above the rest of the pack. His scripts were better, his actors were better, and his overall sensitivity toward telling a decent story was better. The Swinging Cheerleaders delivers what you'd expect from a movie with a title like The Swinging Cheerleaders, but it also delivers a genuinely decent story in the mix, and compared to the other cheerleader movies, is a lot less sleazy and sexually explicit.

Similarly, a lot of the pinky violence films that hit the market during the 1970s weren't aiming to do much more than cram as much T&A and violence onto the screen as they could get away with. And really, just like there's nothing wrong with seedy cheerleader sexploitation movies, there's nothing wrong with Japanese girl gang movies that really don't want to do more than pack the screen with boobs and bloodshed. However, there were also certain movies that managed to fulfill the basic demands of the genre without indulging in the excesses of their contemporaries and while filling in the sex and violence gaps with better stories and better characters. Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess is definitely the Swinging Cheerleaders of the pinky violence trend. It has the T, has the A, and has the violence, but not in the doses that other films (including other films in the Panik House collection) boasted. Instead, it boasts a more complex plot, more sincere melodrama, and more likeable characters. It's a more ambitious movie, and a better one as a result (keeping in mind that greater ambition doesn't always equate with a greater movie -- right, Chronicles of Riddick?).

For starters there's Reiko Oshida. Meiko Kaji and Reiko Ike were the queens of Japanese exploitation cinema during the 1970s (populating a lofty dais alongside Pam Grier from the United States and Chen Ping in Hong Kong), but you'd be hard-pressed to find a cuter, more personable, and more charismatic leading lady than Reiko Oshida. Meiko Kaji looked dangerous, mysterious, and alluring. Reiko looks like the cute girl next door who just took a few wrong turns here and there, but is basically sweet and likeable even if her wrong turns means she also affects a take-no-crap toughness. The character Rika is instantly likeable and, unlike many of the anti-heroines in these films, never really does much that make her the least bit unlikeable. She gets out of prison, smiles, and helps people out. It's a shame Oshida didn't make more movies, girl gang or otherwise, because she emanates an immediate and undeniable warmth. Plus, she's just as engaging once she's "pushed over the edge" and breaks out the red overcoat and katana for the film's outrageous finale as she is as the sweet girl who just wants to build a decent life for herself.

The film perpetuates this impression by steadfastly refusing to make Reiko Oshida drop her drawers -- something practically unheard of for the lead in a pinky violence girl gang movie. But the director (who was also the scriptwriter) was adamant that her lack of nudity was essential to the overall success of the story, and he fought tooth and nail to keep his vision intact. What nudity there is in the film is handled by co-stars Yumiko Katayama (who plays Midori) and Yukie Kagawa (who plays Rika's pal Mari). While Rika's lack of nudity is used as one more way to make her seem different and more innocent than the rest of the cast, it should be noted that none of the girls who lead sexy and promiscuous lifestyles are looked down upon because of their choices. Mari ends up working in a scummy nude modeling club, but the scumminess is seen as entirely belonging to the assholes who go there and treat her poorly. For the most part, sexual liberation and freedom is treated as being OK.

Oshida is buoyed by a spectacular supporting cast. Yukmiko Katayama, who also didn't have much of a career in film before or after this movie (she appeared in one other pinky violence film, Criminal Woman: Killing Medley, which also appears in the Panik House collection), is wonderful as Midori, the most complicated of all the women. She's the more classical pinky violence anti-heroine in that she does a lot of questionable things before finally being redeemed in time for the big showdown. Her boyfriend and the yakuza are suitably slimy, and you spend most of the movie in eager anticipation of the comeuppance you know is going to be delivered unto them.

The rest of the cast performs with solid skill. Pinky violence regular Tsunehiko Watase plays a truck driver who falls for Rika and gets to be the only really decent or dependable guy in the whole movie. Mari's husband is a sickly yakuza who also happens to be the truck driver's brother. He's not a bad guy, but he's a load on his brother and wife, and although he dreams of taking Mari away and starting a clean life, he also can't divorce himself from the delusions associated with being a yakuza. He just has to prove himself, just one time, then he can go. Unfortunately, he ends up being told to prove himself by killing Midori's father (unaware, however, that he is her father). There's also a Lou Costello-type assistant mechanic who is there for comic relief that is neither especially funny nor especially painful -- which is about the best you can hope for when it comes to comic relief. And finally, Nobuo Kaneko hams it up royally as the fey yakuza Boss Ohyu. Nobuo is probably best known for playing the even more cowardly and spineless Boss Yomimori in Kinji Fukasaku's Battles without Honor and Humanity series. He also shows up in some Seijun Suzuki films.

Anchored by a quality cast and a sparkling leading lady, screenwriter/director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi is able to delve into deeper territory than is visited by the average pinky violence film -- in much the same way as Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter. Themes of "female empowerment" and liberation are often grafted onto these films as an easy way to deflect some of the criticism and charges of misogyny that dog such exploitation fare. Usually, these feminist messages are disingenuous and no more meaningful or sincere than when a male scriptwriter uses a female penname to write a porno film, so that the producer can go, "How can it be degrading to women? It was written by a woman?" Now, you know me, and you can probably guess that the honesty of intention in a feminist message isn't exactly something that plays a big factor in helping me decide whether or not I like a movie. However, it is nice to come across the occasional movie that does indeed manage to be both exploitive and pro-woman. The women in Worthless to Confess are all basically good people. They're treated with respect from beginning to end, and the movie doesn't indulge in any of the leering rape nudity that show sup in so many other pinky violence movies. Rika and Midori both find themselves on the receiving end of some yakuza torture and sneering, but it is relatively restrained by pinky violence standards, and cut short before anything really nasty happens.

There is also no weird sex in the movie. One character is alluded to as being a lesbian, but for the most part the characters who do have sex, have pretty normal sex -- which is distinctly abnormal in a pinky violence film. Worthless to Confess is also unique in its portrayal of the family. In most pinky violence films, families are ridiculously dysfunctional; full of shrieking psychotic mothers, incestuous fathers, or parents who simply don't give a damn about anything. Worthless to Confess gives us a kindly and respectable father figure, though, and Rika and her gang really don't want much more out of life than to find a place they can call home and a group of people to whome they can refer to as family. For once, the family and father figure is OK rather than all twisted and weird.

At the same time, most of the men besides Midori's dad and the truck driver are scheming, backstabbing scumbags. The only men who can be trusted are the hard-working, regular Joes -- the truck drivers and the auto mechanics of the world (though Midori's dad has a great twist in his story that reveals him to be a little more than just a simple, hard-working auto mechanic). Most can't be trusted or, at the very least, can't be depended upon.

If they aren't slimeball yakuza tripping over pachinko machines and getting their asses handed to them in fights by Rika, then the men are asexual girlie men. Gang girl Choko, for instance, is married to a nice but ineffectual goofball who cowers behind her at the club when yakuza start throwing their weight around. He spends much of the film in an apron and head scarf, making food and drinks for Choko and her pals.

There's really not much action in this movie, but you don't even notice since the characters are so engaging. The first fight scene doesn't come until the forty-five minute mark, which is very different from, say, Girl Boss Guerilla, which can't go more than five minutes without some chick pulling off her shirt and starting a knife fight. Variety is nice, of course, so while I certainly appreciate a movie like Girl Boss Guerilla, I can also appreciate the more reserved approach of Worthless to Confess.

Of course that reserve goes out the window the second Rika and her girls throw on hot pants and go-go boots, break out their swords, and slice their way through a pop art club full of whimpering, worthless yakuza assholes. If Worthless to Confess lacks the nonstop insanity of many of the zanier entries in the world of pinky violence, it makes up for it with a finale that is off-the-charts awesome, doubly so since the movie has spent the last eighty minutes or so making you actually care about what happens to these women. The sight of Reiko Oshida and her crew walking down the street in formation wearing blood red trenchcoats, which they throw off to reveal their battle outfits and katanas as they explain their intention to slaughter every goddamn yakuza in the club, is an absolutely fantastic procession of images.

Yamaguchi's handling of bad-ass female characters manifested itself elsewhere in his career as well. He directed Etsuko Shiomi's Sister Street Fighter trilogy, which is all about a tough gal sticking it to The Man. He also directed a few Sonny Chiba karate films and something called Wolfman vs. the Supernatural, which I feel like I really need to see. It's obvious that Yamaguchi favored action and plot over sex and titillation, and while I have no problem with any mix of those three elements, his focus on developing characters and telling a more complete and complicated story means that, while Worthless to Confess is not the most outrageous or the most typical pinky violence film, it is one of the very best and most enjoyable.

I really hope the other films in the series find their way onto DVD soon.

Labels: Action: Pinky Violence, Action: Yakuza, Country: Japan, Year: 1971