Zubekô banchô: Yume wa yoru hiraku

First off this is a "pinky violence" film so expect street drama with a strong dash of exploitation cinema and over-the-top gangster gags. One of the strong points of this genre is that a lot of unique directorial experimentation was going on here, lots of psychedelic visual cues, odd turns of narrative and wild swings in tone.

Blossoming Night Dreams is somewhere between the Stray Cat Rock series and the Terrifying Girls High School series in the pinky violence scale, still going for some elements of "straight" drama but at times reaching near-parody levels. There is some breast-flashing but no explicit rape and torture (as pinky violence films would seem to revel in later on). Some scenes are definitely spoofs of yakuza films so it came as some surprise to me that this came out as early as it did.

Basically Rika (Reiko Oshida) is released from girls detention school and then winds up at a lounge bar where she finds her other classmates working. This lounge bar is run by Junko Miyazono (who did a trilogy of proto-pinky violence films in the Female Demon Okatsu series). By coincidence I had just seen Quick Draw Okatsu which also featured her and Reiko Oshida in a supporting role which I enjoyed and so to see this pair again in a more modern setting (and in color) was pretty cool.

Anyways, the local bad guy boss is trying to acquire the lounge and basically the film is about the girls getting in trouble with drugs, boys and each other, and Miyazono's struggle to keep her bar from Ohba the big baddie.

The plot as usual is not all that important. The main thing that stood out for me with this film is Reiko Oshida and Junko Miyazono. Reiko is very cute and always seems so cheerful and carefree even when kicking the teeth out of some other girl gangster. This makes her different from the other major stars of this kind of film (Meiko Kaji, Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto, etc...). The first time I saw her in "Delinquent Girl Boss:Worthless to Confess" I kind of wrote her off but now I can appreciate the difference her approach brings to the genre. In fact now that I think about it, hers may be the more unique characterization, since the more stoic portrayals by Kaji and the others (not to diminish them in any way) are somewhat more prevalent in films from Leone's Man with No Name series to Kill Bill to They Call Her One Eye. Miyazono adds a good touch of class and she also has a nice sword battle at the end. Too bad Reiko didn't do so much with a blade this time, I thought her blade skills were slick in Quick Draw Okatsu. In sum, not quite an essential pinky violence film, but definitely worth catching, especially if you watch this after a few Stray Cat Rock films on your way to the Girl Boss Guerilla films or Female Yakuza Tale.