Femmes Fatales | Feb 4 2016 |
Vintage Pulp | Oct 5 2015 |
Vintage Pulp | Nov 1 2014 |
The above poster is the original promo Kôyû Ohara’s motorcycle gang roman porno Shiroi mesuneko: mahiru no ecstasy, aka White Female Cat: Ecstasy at High Noon, and as you can see star Hitomi Kozue is completely flouting the mandatory helmet ordinance. Well, the point of riding a motorcycle is to feel the wind blow through your… er, hair. We haven’t screened this one, but we love the poster so we thought we’d show it to you anyway on its premiere date, which was today in 1975.
Vintage Pulp | Sep 22 2014 |
Vintage Pulp | Apr 20 2014 |
So, we’ve returned from our brief vacation, and we’re gearing back up with three Japanese posters we meant to share during the week we were away. Sukeban Deka: daati Marii, aka Sukeban Deka: Dirty Mary, is a Dirty Harry style thriller from Nikkatsu Studios starring Hitomi Kozue. Kozue had already appeared in a number of erotic movies, so Nikkatsu made a right turn with her career, scaling back sex and nudity in favor of gritty action.
At least, that was the idea. But there actually isn’t much action. The plot involves Kozue investigating murder, which in turn leads to her uncovering blackmail and illicit photos, and in the process there’s a couple of minutes of gunplay, a fistfight she loses (after which she's stripped, molested, and photographed), and a dynamite explosion. The lack of compelling action probably explains, at least partially, why the movie was a commercial failure.
Despite its shortcomings you have to give Kozue this: she looks convincingly badass. And it’s worth noting that the film has become more popular over the years as viewers have reassessed its merits. However, it’s not so highly regarded yet that it’s easy to find. You might find it online if you search very hard. But if you can't locate it, as consolation we’ve uploaded a nice Hitomi Kozue promo shot below. Sukeban Deka: Dirty Mary premiered in Japan today in 1974.
Vintage Pulp | Mar 13 2014 |
Here’s our process: we have scores of these Japanese posters but usually know nothing about the movies. So we pick a nice one and start digging. A simple internet search on virtually any obscure pinku or roman porno film brings up pages of useless results, often empty sites that reflect the search terms back into Bing or Google, drawing clicks. The presence of these sites is something that’s really changed on the internet in the last five years and it makes finding info on obscure movies more time consuming than it used to be. But we take our hobby seriously, and so we keep slogging our way through the digital swamps. And with the help of legit informational pages like romanporno.com and wpedia.goo.ne.jp, as well as visual sites like onesheetindex.com that allow us to confirm we have the art and info matched correctly, quite often we eventually end up seeing a pretty good movie.
Above is a promo poster for OL nikki: Chigireta aiyoku, aka Office Lady Journal: Ruined Lust, and for this one we weren’t so lucky—we found info but we couldn’t find anyplace to download or watch the actual film. But we can tell you it was written and directed by Asao Kuwayama, and it starred Hiroshi Chô, Hiroshi Gojo, and one of our favorite ’70s actresses, Hitomi Kozue, who plays Yuko, an office worker whose boyfriend wants to marry her but doesn’t know she’s a prostitute by night. Naturally, her secret doesn’t last for long. As with many Nikkatsu Studios films, Office Lady was a series, with six entries made between 1972 and 1975, of which Kozue appeared in two. Another Office Lady appeared in 1977 but it seems to be considered non-canonical, for some reason. That’s all we found out, but at least we can offer something new—the quality digital image above. It’s a serious upgrade over what’s out there currently. OL nikki: Chigireta aiyoku premiered in Japan today in 1974.
Vintage Pulp | Jan 7 2011 |
Above is a vintage Japanese poster for the 1976 roman porno flick Boko!, or Assault!, with Hitomi Kozue, a major star during her time about whom there’s a serious dearth of information on the web today. Kozue began her career modeling in Tokyo in the early seventies, and was soon making appearances on late night television. In 1972 Nikkatsu Studios cast her in Showa onnamichi: Rashomon, or Naked Rashomon.
The film was a hit and for the next five years Kozue was one of the company’s most bankable stars, fusing sex and violence in pinku and roman porno productions like Onna kyöshi: shiseikatsu (Female Teacher: Private Life), Nikutai hanzai kaigan: piranha no mure (Sex-Crime Coast: School of Piranha), and Bankaku joshikökösei no sex to böryoku no jittai (True Story of Sex and Violence in a Female High School).
As we’ve pointed out before, roman porno flicks weren’t actual porn—the term was short for “romantic porno”, and the productions were artfully shot, non-explicit erotica. The genre’s modesty had to do with a nationwide prohibition on showing pubic hair rather than an aesthetic choice by Nikkatsu, but the results were often visually ingenious.
Kozue expanded her repertoire into music, releasing a single in 1976, and—like her contemporaries Reiko Ike, Miki Sugimoto, Yayoi Watanabe and others—constantly stoked her fans’ libidos with tasteful nude photos and posters. You see two of those images below.
In all, Kozue made about twenty-five films, leaving the business in 1977 at the height of her fame to become a wife and mother. But even though her time in film was all too brief, she left behind a sizable body of work, one we’ll be exploring, along with those of other pinku stars, as this year moves forward.
Vintage Pulp | Jul 1 2010 |
One good pinku deserves another, and such is the case with Kôyû Ohara’s True Story of a Woman Condemned: Sex Hell. It was released in March 1975, and the follow-up, for which you see the promo poster above, appeared a mere three months later. It’s almost like they planned to make a sequel all along. Installment two was called Zoku jituroku onna kanbetsusho, aka True Story of a Woman Condemned Continues, and tells the story of Hitomi Kozue's imprisonment after she takes revenge upon her rapists. Once in jail she must deal with both the brutal inmate heirarchy, and the indignities suffered at the hands of prison staffers. It gets brutal. At one point Kozue pummels a rival badly enough to make her miscarry her baby. All we can say is the movie isn’t quite our thing, but we give creativity points—we’ve never seen hot soup poured in a woman's vagina before. Zoku jituroku onna kanbetsusho premiered in Tokyo today in 1975.
Vintage Pulp | Mar 5 2010 |
Vintage poster for Jitsuroku onna kanbetsusho: sei-jigoku, aka True Story of a Woman Condemned: Sex Hell, directed by Kôyû Ohara and starring Hitomi Kozue, who you see below. The movie is a women-in-prison flick, which means tough conditions, worse inmates, and the very worst guards imaginable. Obviously, all such movies were mainly excuses to show a lot of skin on flimsy pretexts—shower time!—and indulge in same sex eroticism and vicious catfights. As a genre, women-in-prison movies were a global phenomenon. Nearly every country with a film industry made them, none more copiously than the United States. But the Japanese entries tend to be very provocative. Jitsuroku onna kanbetsusho: sei-jigoku premiered in Japan today in 1975.