If Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess represents the high-end and high-brow in the low-brow Japanese girl gang movies of the 1970s, then Girl Boss Guerilla represents the comfortable middle ground. There is nothing exceptional about this film, nothing that is strikingly good or bad. It is a solid if unremarkable entry in the sukeban genre that ruled the Japanese exploitation circuit during the first half of the 1970s.

Miki Sugimoto stars as Sachiko, leader of the terrifying Red Helmet Gang from Shinjuku, Tokyo's favorite yakuza-themed neighborhood. The first shot in the movie, of our skinny heroines in cheap red motorcycle helmets riding crummy little motorcycles is as cool as it is ludicrous. We soon learn that he girls are en route from Tokyo to Kyoto, where they plan to take over and show those medieval capitol yokels how they do things in the big, glittering city. Luckily, this involves Sachiko frequently unzipping her biker girl catsuit to show off her rose tattoo and boobs as she and her girls beat up local chumps. The ruckus they cause upon arriving in Kyoto soon attracts the ire of the hometown girl gang, which doesn't take too kindly to these out-of-towners showing up and running scams in Kyoto gang turf. Sachiko's solution to the problem is to simply kick the ass of the Kyoto girl gang boss. When the Kyoto leader refuses to turn over leadership of the city's girl gangs to Sachiko, former Kyoto boss Rieko Ike shows up to force her old gang to obey the rules of combat.

Now in control of the Kyoto girl gang action, Sachiko soon draws the ire of the yakuza, who see the girl gangs as nothing but a sideshow and demand that the girls give them a majority of whatever they manage to bilk from the rubes while running a host of scams that often involve goofy slapstick humor that goes on forever and never manages to be funny. What more can you ask of comedy than that it go on for ever and not be funny? Meanwhile, Sachiko falls for a young boxer and ends up abandoning her post as "girl boss guerilla" in favor of accompanying him and his cohorts to a resort. The rest of the Red Helmets go as well, and you really have to wonder why they drove all the way to Kyoto and took over the town's girl gang action if they weren't really all that into it. Needless to say, the boxer has "yakuza victim" written all over him, which will lead us to our usual "girls against the yakuza" finale.

Girl Boss Guerilla is the third in a series of films, and it has nothing the least bit original to offer, but that doesn't really matter. Sometimes, well-executed formula is a lot more fun than ambitious ground-breaking. Girl Boss Guerilla isn't exactly well-executed, but when it hits, it hits it out of the park. The problem is that, much like Babe Ruth, Girl Boss Guerilla strikes out about as often as it hits, and the ensuing wildly uneven nature of the film keep it from ever being as good as it should be.

When it sticks to its exploitation guns is when the movie gets to strut. There are frequent cat fights, and almost everyone one of them ends up with the combatants flailing around half-naked, with torn tops and bouncing boobs. The movie is full of gratuitous breasts, scummy leering yakuza, and chicks doing that traditional girl gang greeting where they extend one hand while they rest the other on their knee. Gender roles, machismo, and religion (especially religion) are ham-fistedly skewered, but I can appreciate the sentiment even if the point is made with all the subtlety of...well, collecting used condoms from Buddhist monks and getting the clap from a Catholic priest. It's not like these pinky violence movies have ever been subtle about anything.

The problems occur when the movie veers away from tried and true exploitation territory and dwells in the sewer of comedy, which it does far too often. A couple of the jokes are OK -- one of Sachiko's gang sisters tries to lure men into bed, then blackmail them for money, only she's too much of a nympho to ever complete the blackmail portion of her missions. That's about as funny and about as clever as the comedy gets. Most of it of the variety you'd expect to have accompanied by that old "wah-wahhhh" music. In fact, during the peeing monk scene, they may have even used that.

Director Norifumi Suzuki has a long and uncomfortable relationship with comedy, and while he has given us some bona fide exploitation classics like Sex and Fury and Roaring Fire, where Hiroyuki Sanada improves his karate by listening to disco music and adding snapping and hip swinging to his katas, but he's always had a heroin-like addiction to forcing really dumb comedy asides

Miki Sugimoto will become a familiar face to anyone who spends enough time on the seedy, neon-soaked back streets of Japanese exploitation films. Her filmography encompasses a couple exploitation classics, a few (like this film) pretty good movies, and something with the title Prostitute with Strong Vagina Muscles, which someone really needs to me a copy of as soon as possible. Her biggest role was probably in the original Zero Woman movie, Red Handcuffs, and over-the-top mind-blower that, unfortunately, inspired a decade's worth of really boring and bland shot-on-video knock-offs during the 1990s. Why all those awful movies are readily available in the US, yet Prostitute with Strong Vagina Muscles remains missing in action is something I'll never understand.