Above, an alternate version of the poster for Denki kurage: kawaii akuma, aka Electric Medusa: Lovely Wicked Woman, aka Play it Cool, with Mari Atsumi. See the slightly different version we posted in 2011 here. 

Another rare Japanese one-sheet, this advertises Rashamen oman: ame no Oranda-zaka, aka, Woman Gambler with Blue Eyes. The eyes in question belong to Sally May, who in addition to acting put together a singing career in Japan. We have another rare Japanese promo involving gambling geishas here. Rashamen oman: ame no Oranda-zaka premiered in Tokyo today in 1972. 

Way back in 2009 two promos for Seijû gakuen were the first pinku posters we ever shared on Pulp Intl. Ah, the good old days. We got the title wrong and misspelled the name of the star, but other than that, what a glorious memory. When we located that pair of posters we also found two others, and now, years later, we’re getting around to sharing those too. Seijû gakuen was known in the West as School of the Holy Beast, and above you see a rare two panel horizontal poster. At that orientation it renders a little small here, so we’ve posted the panels seperately below:

Although many directors and performers were involved in the Girl Boss movies, on some level Nikkatsu Studios was behind most of them as either producers or distributors. This one is an exception. The movie was called Soft-Shelled Turtle Girl Boss, it was made by Dai Nippon Eiga Seisaku Kabushiki Kaisha, which was known as Daiei Film for short, and it had Taro Yuge in the director’s chair and Eiko Yanami in the lead. We don’t know anything about the plot, but it’s a pinku girl boss flick, so she probably seeks and achieves revenge against a bunch of gangster types. We’ll look for more info, if not a copy of the movie. In the meantime, we’ll just enjoy the poster, which is absolutely killer. Soft-Shelled Turtle Girl Boss premiered in Japan today in 1971. 

Above, a poster for Tadashi Yoyogi’s Semi-dokyumento: Sukeban yôjimbô, aka Girl Boss Document. A less known Girl Boss movie, this starred Noriko Igarashi, who you see brazenly flashing her tighty whities on the poster. It premiered in Japan today in 1974.

Furyô banchô: Inoshika Ochô, aka Wolves of the City, aka Wolves of the City: Ocho the She-Wolf was a significant hole in our Japanese actioner viewing résumé, but we solved that by watching the film a few days ago. In short, you get an amoral motorcycle gang in Nazi regalia pitted against evil Yakuza, with the tide eventually turning when the legendary hellion Ocho the She-Wolf teams up with the gang. The movie looks great. Yukio Noda’s direction—for the most part—is a marvel. He frames shots with six, seven, sometimes even a dozen interacting characters spread across the screen, yet it all seems effortless. Modern directors don’t seem remotely interested in using shots like these anymore, which is a shame, but it may also be a function of today’s screenwriters choosing to limit the number of characters who interact simultaneously. In any case, this is one thing we loved about the movie and we’ve shared some images of this technique below.

But Wolves of the City is a mixed bag. It relies upon numerous violent set pieces, but where the dialogue sequences feel so carefully thought out, the action is pure Keystone Kops. Because Noda continues framing large numbers of actors in single shots, his performers seem more intent uponhitting their stage marks than making these confrontations look realistic. They reach their required positions in the scenes, but these hardened gangsters handle pistols and machine guns as if they were rubber snakes, dealing a major blow to what should be the visceral thrill of such moments. By packing the screen during the gunfights Noda forces the audience to accept that nobody can successfully shoot anyone from five feet away. It feels very bang-bang-you’re-dead amateurish, complete with wounded gangsters clutching their chests, spinning around, and falling to the floor.

In the end the plot ushers us through various deals, deceptions, and shootouts, and you finally get the inevitable throwdown between the bikers and the Yakuza. This is the most unlikely sequence of all, with bikers motoring around none too swiftly inside a confined warehouse while still miraculously being missed by a hailstorm of screaming lead. But by now we know what we’re going to get and we just have to go with it. At one point Ocho puts out a gangster’s eyes and archly informs him (as if he can hear through the head-splitting pain), “You’re the seventeenth victim of Ocho of Inoshika’s eye attack!” This movie does attack the eyes rather beautifully, and if you look past the Vaudeville antics of the action scenes you may enjoy it. The panel length poster at top is rare, and as far as we know it’s the only one of its kind to be seen online. Furyô banchô: Inoshika Ochô premiered in Japan today in 1969.

Above, an excellent pinku poster of a recalcitrant tough guy having a knife held to his eye by an even tougher woman. It’s for a movie entitled Girl Boss: Dirty Fellows, but as usual we have to add the disclaimer that the translation here may be a bit off. Definitely the text says “girl/lady/woman” and “gang leader” which can be interpreted as “girl boss” or maybe “lady boss.” The rest, well, we’ve done our best. Also, it looks like Teruyo Hasegawa was in this movie, and we were told the release year was 1969, but that seems a bit late for Hasegawa, who was in films as early as 1954. Anyway, that’s all we got. If we mess up something we’re usually emailed about it, so we’ll just wait and see on this one.