Good news for pulp fans. Norton Records, through its publishing arm Kick Books, is releasing a collection of post-pulp author Harlan Ellison’s early juvenile delinquent fiction. Ellison, many of you already know, made his rep writing some of the most out there sci-fi of the 1960s and 1970s, including 1969’s classic novella “A Boy and His Dog,” 1974’s award winner “The Deathbird,” and 1978’s collection Strange Wine. The new Kick Books collection, entitled Pulling a Train, brings together Ellison’s juvenile delinquent fiction, which he wrote during the late 1950s and early 1960s. For those unfamiliar with his work, we could cite chapter and verse some of the astounding prose he’s set to paper (“Croatoan,” “All the Birds Come Home To Roost,” “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”), but instead just consider this: one of his favorite activities over the years has been to sit in a bookstore window beginning at opening time, and by the end of the day have written a complete short story. On a typewriter. And to make the feat more challenging, the premise or first sentence of the story would be supplied to him by a stranger. Yet, at least one of these tales went on to win awards. You can learn a bit more about the unique Ellison and his new collection at the Norton Records/Kick Books website. 

This is one side of a chirashi, or two-sided mini-poster, for Gerard Damiano’s 1977 porno flick Water Power, with Sharon Mitchell and Jamie Gillis. Like most chirashi, it features art produced especially for the Japanese market, which makes it highly collectible (assuming you actually dare to collect porn posters). The image doesn’t really read as erotic to us, but then neither does the movie—enemas, yuck. But hey, if you’re into that sort of thing, we don’t judge. Whatever floats your butt. We’ve taken a photo of the reverse side of the poster, below, and we also had a more conventional Japanese Water Power poster, and we threw that in just for the fun of it. The film had its Japanese premiere in Tokyo today in 1980. Side note: we snagged a pile of these chirashi with no idea what movies they were for, and once we found out they were for pornos decided not to post them. But now we’ve changed our minds because the images are interesting, after all. So look for more of these down the line. 

Tanya’s Island may not be the best sexploitation flick of all time, but it’s surely one of the most earnest. Before she hooked up with Prince and became known as Vanity, Canadian actress D.D. Winters headlined this deeply Freudian beauty-and-the-beast psychodrama about a young actress who lucidly dreams of going to live with her painter boyfriend on a deserted island, only to discover that they are in fact not alone. The imaginary island’s other inhabitant is a sort of tropical sasquatch (but with soulful blue eyes), and within the reverie Tanya develops, her boyfriend becomes jealous and aggressive while the ape seems to take on increasingly more humanity. Since this all takes place in Tanya’s head, some pretty interesting questions are being raised about the nature of female desire, as well as both the savage and civilized sides of man. Perhaps you’re rolling your eyes now, and that’s fair enough, but a big reason why these seventies skin flicks are great to watch is because the filmmakers took themselves so seriously. Writer/producer Pierre Brousseau even plastered the 1982 Cannes Film Festival with posters in hopes of generating attention for his movie. His strategy probably didn’t boost box office receipts much, but it did increase interest in his lead actress, resulting in her appearance in Playboy, and thence into the arms of Prince. Since Tanya’s Island is indeed about a woman searching for her prince charming, there’s a certain symmetry in this. But probably the only symmetry you’re really interested in is Vanity’s, so you’ll be happy to know she’s completely naked before the opening credits have finished and remains half or wholly bare through much of the film. And for our female readers, her boyfriend’s member makes a brief appearance as well (though we suspect you won’t find the man attached to that appendage particularly alluring). Soon after this film Vanity would become famous as a singer and consort, and in one of her most memorable songs she cooed: “Ooh yeah, such a pretty mess.” That neatly sums up Tanya’s Island. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1980. 

We have something a little different today, a bit of modern pulp from Central Europe. These are Hungarian posters for George Lucas’s Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, which incidentally were going for the equivalent of $350.00. Yes, seriously. Premier dates on these are a little obscure, but the Hungarian re-releases took place in 1997, so we’ll go with that. Of course, it’s worth pointing out again that the main reason wonderful posters like these make it to the foreign marketplace is that the designers are freed from the anti-artistic influence of Hollywood marketing departments, which tend to be hands off when promoting big re-releases overseas (new films, of course, have the same promo art as in America, i.e. incredibly bad, which in turn leads to the sad sight of your humble authors trying to slink unnoticed past displays for Saw 3D and Zookeeper, but that’s another post entirely). See a great Star Wars poster from Poland here. 

Below, twelve covers of the very racy Italian fumetto Pornostar, with its blonde protagonist Beba. Pornostar is another Giovanni Romanini creation, along with Wallestein, Ulula, Lady Domina, et.al, circa mid-1980s. See a few more here.

Japanese cinema loves its nuns, whether clothed or naked, dominant or submissive, or sometimes just copping a squat in the woods. So today for your enjoyment we have six sexploitation posters featuring these figures, spanning the years 1968 through 1980. Remember, just looking isn't a sin. Title and star info appears at bottom.

From top to bottom: Nun’s Prohibited Night with Yuki Nohira, Tattooed Nun’s Dissolute Life with Jun Kosugi, Nunnery Confidential with Junko Fuji, A Nun’s Rope Hell with Naomi Oka, Humiliated Nun with Mihoko Kuga, and Black Clothed Nun’s Pain with Eri Kanuma. As you know by now, these films had no Western release, which means the English titles we’ve given are approximate, at best. 

Above, a poster for Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury, made for the DVD release around 1999 or 2000. Fist of Fury should not be confused with Fists of Fury. The latter was released in 1971 and was known in the U.S. as The Big Boss, whereas Fist of Fury was known as The Chinese Connection as well as The Iron Hand, and its Mandarin title was Jīng Wǔ Mén. Got all that? Great. Fist of Fury premiered in Hong Kong today in 1972. 

Sado-masochism has been a mainstay of Japanese art for a long time. During the 1980s, their filmmakers took explorations of S&M further than any cinema had before, and in so doing invented torture porn long before the term was coined to describe American movies like Saw and Hostel. The major difference in Japan is that the films were misogynistic as well. Below is a collection of ten one-sheets for Japanese sado-masochist films released in 1985 and 1986. We don’t recommend any of these for viewing, but the promo art, er… kills. 

Let’s not debate it. Jamie Summers was the hottest partly mechanical woman ever to appear on television. Perhaps that has to do with the fact that she was one of the only partly mechanical woman to ever appear on television, but let’s not quibble. The series The Bionic Woman, starring Lindsay Wagner as a tennis pro-turned-spy who had assorted cybernetic body parts, ran on American television for three years from 1976 to 1978, and was syndicated for Japan starting in 1977. She was originally created as a sort of Bride of Frankenstein for Lee Majors’ popular ABC character Steve Austin on The Six Million Dollar Man. At the end of a two-part episode Jamie Summers died, but the character had been so popular that a method was contrived for bringing her back from the dead. A year later—presto!—she had her own series on which she battled a sasquatch, got roughed up by Fembots, and malfunctioned a few times, all while searching for but never quite managing to find that special someone.The Bionic Woman spun off books, board games, and yes, even music, as evidenced by the 45 rpm record sleeve at top of the show’s theme song by Jerry Fielding. We checked out a few episodes of the show online, and let’s just say that while it hasn’t aged well in terms of fx or dramatic content (and it’s exactly the sort of thing our girlfriends laugh at because of all the high-waisted jeans, jumpsuits and feathered hair), there is a sort of sweetness to it all that’s hard (for us, anyway) to resist. Ah, the Cold War. It seems so quaint now. If you have the inclination and the spare time, you can see a clip here. 

Above is a poster for Tatsumi Kumashiro’s pinku Akai kami no onna, aka Woman with Red Hair, starring Junko Miyashita and Renji Ishabashi. How to explain this one? Well, it’s a sexual melodrama about a man and woman who embark on an obsessive affair, with a subplot about a gang raped girl who develops an attachment to one of her attackers. It’s supposed to be a commentary on misogyny and abuse, but despite the noble intent, beautiful cinematography and rain-drenched atmosphere, it didn’t do much for us. However, Miyashita won awards for her performance, and the film was well-received when released, so we’re willing to concede that it’s a piece of art that is firmly of its time (i.e., before our time) and can perhaps only be understood in that temporal and cultural context. As to the latter, we checked out some reviews and a theme that ran through them was that this is a film so Japanese in nature that it doesn’t translate well for westerners. So you know what we did? We watched it again without subtitles. Since it’s only seventy-three minutes long, we weren’t sacrificing a lot of time. And guess what happened? We understood and liked it a lot better. So take that for what it's worth. And while you’re at it, take the lovely Junko Miyashita promo poster below. It's another rare find of ours, never before seen online. Akai kami no onna premiered in Japan today in 1979.