Sukeban

With the tight funk and cool jazz only the best in exploitation in show up with this came to me as a surprise this early and that far from the land of tomato sauce and olive oil, even considering the early exploits of Suzuki Seijun and Imamura Shohei.

Firstly this is 70s sleaze and mob cinema of the highest order and secondly girls this tough and impolite, Sugimoto's sukeban is in fact comparable to Tura Satana if not even badder(!), a girl this strong cant be hurt by anything. Still, even if the sequence with chains and beatings are sexist sleaze of a very perverted kind the way (at least) the invulnerable Sugimoto is "unmanhandlable" is equally feminist.

The storyline is about some girls escaping a from a prisoner transport and four of them make the gang "gypsies", of course the mob life is hard and the competing gangs are hard to beat. Its the girls against the boys, who'll win ?

While being driven to a correction facility in a police van full of female prisoners, a gang leader from Osaka named "Maya" (Reiko Ike) is introduced to a notorious gangster by the name of "Kanto Komasa" (Miki Sugimoto). However, their meeting is cut short when another vehicle pulls up alongside the van and forces it to come to a complete stop. During the confusion all of the prisoners escape and go their own way with Kanto eventually accepting the leadership position for 3 of the young women from the van. It's at this time that they decide to go to Osaka and establish their presence there but soon encounter a rival gang led by a woman Kanto had problems with earlier. To make matters even worse, when Maya returns to Osaka she finds her boyfriend "Tetsuko" (Shinobu) in the arms of Kanto and a bounty on her head from the same Yakuza gang Tetsuko has joined. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this movie is very similar to several other films in the "Girl Boss" series but slightly more raw and brutal in some respects. Likewise, some of the action scenes seemed rather cheap and amateurish as well. Fortunately, having the attractive Miki Sugimoto in the lead role helped balance things out to a certain degree. That being said, I have rated this film accordingly. Average.

OK, you have to like Pinky Violence films, or at least be able to see the humor of it, or just want to get your hands on anything by the master of Japanese sexploitation, Norifumi Suzuki. As it goes for me, I just want anything with Miki Sugimoto in it. If I may be just a wee bit sexist about this: she has every protruding body part stuck in exactly the right corpo-topographic position.

But anyway, it has been argued that this film (the 4th in the Sukeban-series, aka Girl Boss or Onna Bancho, and the final one to be directed by Suzuki) takes itself a bit too seriously compared to its predecessor (Sukeban Guerilla). And this is true (now that I've seen Guerilla). Still, it takes less time to get to top speed (whatever that is in these exploitation films) than that one, and some scenes are really well-shot. Although I abhor the woman-betraying-guy-who-means-it-well type. F*#% it, the guy should just get a serious beating woman! Where's the sukeban spirit here?!

So quite OK, but for exploitation-fans only. But Miki Sugimoto is great, though there are a couple of other flicks that do her more justice.

ps: the torture-while-in-chains is almost a carbon-copy of the one in Guerilla; and, for that, Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs is still the better one.