I Am Curious Pink

Finally got around to watching the last film in the "Pinky Violence Collection" DVD Set that I

got last year for Christmas. Here's the list of films in the set:

"Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess"

"Girl Boss Guerilla"

"Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom"

"Criminal Woman: Killing Melody"

As you can see, they were all inspired by the works of Jane Austin. No, that's a lie. They're Japanese sexplotation flicks from the 1970s and they're certainly an acquired taste.

Why, Mike, why do you waste your time with trash cinema? Cause it's fun and sometimes you'll see something surprising. Case in point, the last pic I watched was "Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom." How often do you get to see a film start with the torture and suicide of a Japanese schoolgirl by the school's all-girl discipline squad? It was graphic and surreal and I wouldn't want to go out on a limb and say that it was entertaining. It certainly grabs your attention and makes you wonder, where can they go now?

Turns out this school is a social experiment where bad girls are sent to get retrained to be model wives and mothers. This is accomplished by giving the worst of the lot the power to discipline rule breakers. It's a set-up that is easily corrupted.

Enter three outlaws--a thief, a whore and girl yakuza--who run afoul of the discipline squad and quickly turn the table on authority, with satisfying violent results. The end reminded me a lot of "Rock and Roll High School," in a good way.

As a sexploitation genre, Pinky Violence offers a weird mix of crime and teenage rebellion. The twist, of course, is that all the protagonists are women. Directed by men and aimed at an adolescent masculine audience, the scales, at least initially, tip toward titillation in the first part of each of these films, with nudity and racy situations coming fast and furious. But in their odd way the films grow into moral plays as the women use whatever means necessary--sex, fear, larceny and violence--to empower themselves. They fight authority no matter who yields it, man, woman, yakuza boss, husband or principal. I wouldn't say that these are feminist films, maybe proto-feminist films--they can't quite shake off their exploitation exterior after all.

The best of the four films is "Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess," which is about a young woman who forms a gang while in prison. When she gets out and her father gets in trouble with the local gang boss, she calls together her prison cronies and forms her own female mob. The way that the mob stuff is presented reflects a lot of the mainstream yakuza flicks that were popular in the late 60s and early 70s, so it has a more genuine feel to it than the other films in he set. The other flicks blend in more humor than "Girl Boss" and come off like farces at times. "Girl Boss" resembles "Lady Snowblood," though that film was set in samurai times. It's only natural since mainstream Japanese cinema was trying to link the trappings of the samurai genre to that of the Japanese mob (yakuza) films.

I got drawn to these films because of my fascination with Quentin Tarantino's work, "Kill Bill 1&2" in particular. Pinky Violence is at the roots of Tarantino's films, the theme of the bad guys--or girls--who overcome evil to achieve vengeance or their own brand of justice. Cool stuff.