Well, we said we’d explore Japanese bondage arts a bit more, so here’s a nice beginning—a collection of colorful SM magazines from the 1970s. We’ll show you what’s inside one of these later. 

Vintage poster for Jitsuroku onna kanbetsusho: sei-jigoku, aka True Story of a Woman Condemned: Sex Hell, directed by Koyu Ohara and starring Hitomi Kozue. It premiered in Japan today in 1975. 

We love Bond stuff here, as you’ve probably figured out already. So we were pretty excited to find this Japanese advert for Imai’s scale model Aston Martin DB-5, a car which appeared in the James Bond films Goldfinger, Thunderball, Goldeneye, Tomorrow Never Dies, and Casino Royale. The painting is a lot more impressive than the actual model, but we could be convinced to buy it anyway, as long it’s equipped with a tiny ejector seat. 

Maybe the English word “sex” is to the Japanese what the French word “soirée” is to English speakers—i.e., a foreign word that carries more meaning than its indigenous equivalent. Maybe “sex” sounds really dirty to Japanese ears. Maybe it’s just conveniently short. We don’t know the answer, but below are six one-sheets using that magical English syllable. However you say it, just do it. 

Photo of Japanese model/singer/actress Linda Yamamoto, aka Yamamoto Rinda, circa 1993. 

Japanese promo poster for the American porno flick Glitter, with an image of star Shauna Grant, 1983. Grant committed suicide a year after this film was released. 

Promo poster of Japanese actress Meiko Kaji, star of the seminal pinku sword opera Lady Snowblood, pictured here circa 1973. 

What you’re looking at are two pieces of Japanese promo art for the Italian shocker Cannibal Holocaust. Released in 1980, the film was so disturbing that it was banned by several countries, and resulted in director Ruggero Deodato being dragged before authorities who were seriously intent on jailing him for the rest of his life. In order to avoid that fate, he had to prove that his actors had not been killed during filming, and in particular, he had to show that the scene of an indigenous Amazonian girl impaled on a pole was just a special effect. But even knowing the impalement, a castration, a disembowelment, a beheading, and the cannibalism are all fake doesn’t make the film any easier to stomach, mainly because it features some real atrocities, such as a three-foot long turtle being de-shelled, a pig being shot to death, and a monkey having its face cut off with a machete. On the plus side, the Brazilian scenery is beautiful. Cannibal Holocaust’s central premise of lost film footage being found and reviewed in order to determine the fate of the foolhardy foreigners who shot it sets up like familiar horror, but in all other respects the film pushes the envelope so far it’s on the outside looking in. Think you’re tough? Give this one a try. Cannibal Holocaust premiered in Tokyo in January 1983. 

Five Screen covers with, top to bottom, the always wonderful Ann-Margret, followed by Jane Fonda, Urusula Weiss, Elke Sommer, and lastly, someone we’re going to say is French actress Mylène Demongeot. If we’re wrong, we’ll correct ourselves later. Concerning Miss Weiss, we found no references to her anywhere online, but we did find two actresses named Ursula—not Urusula—Weiss. One acted in the 1950s, so she’s out as a possibility, and one acted in a film in 2000, which would make her an egg when this 1977 cover came out. We’ll keep looking. Not knowing won’t keep us up nights, but it’s always good to fill in these blanks. If you know anything, feel free to drop us a line.