Pinky violence

Pinky violence is the name English-language critics give to a run of Japanese exploitation films made mostly at Toei between about 1971 and 1974. They put pink film (pinku eiga) nudity inside action and yakuza-film plots, usually around a gang of women or a lone avenger, and several are shot with far more ambition than the budget required. Cult-film writers also use the phrase "Toei's bad girl cinema" for the same shelf.

What defines it

• Female leads who run things. Gang bosses, convicts, schoolgirl delinquents and sword-carrying avengers, with the men mostly there to be beaten.
• Soft-core content on a major-studio budget. The sex and nudity are in the contract, but the sets, widescreen framing and crews are Toei's.
• Revenge as the engine. A woman is wronged by a gang, a prison, a school or a clan, and the plot is her settling it.
• Tonal swerves. Comedy, brutality and lurid melodrama sit in the same reel.

Where it came from

Most Japanese exploitation of the 1960s came from small independents. Toei had dabbled, and Teruo Ishii's ero-guro and Joys of Torture films of the late 1960s gave it a model, a queasy mix of comedy and torture. In July 1971 Toei began advertising films with the then-new English word "porno", starting with Norifumi Suzuki's Onsen mimizu geisha, starring Reiko Ike. Producer Kanji Amao set up three lines: the Sensational Line, the Abnormal Line and the Shameless Line. The pinky violence films grew out of that package. Nikkatsu went further that November, switching to Roman Porno only.

The series that mattered were Delinquent Girl Boss (Zubeko Bancho, Reiko Oshida), Suzuki's Girl Boss (Sukeban) films and the Terrifying Girls' High School films with Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto, and Shunya Ito's Female Prisoner Scorpion films, adapted from Toru Shinohara's manga.

Meiko Kaji is the face of the later wave. She left Nikkatsu partly to get away from its Roman Porno line, and the unblinking stare she does in Scorpion and Lady Snowblood is the most copied image in Japanese genre cinema. It went into Kill Bill more or less intact.

Key titles on this site

• Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion (1972), Jailhouse 41 and Beast Stable (1972 and 1973): Ito's three, and the reason the category gets taken seriously.
• Girl Boss Guerilla (1972): Suzuki at full speed, with Reiko Ike.
• Sex & Fury (1973): the naked snow swordfight, and a Meiji-era revenge plot around it.
• Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom (1973): a girls' school run like a police state.
• School of the Holy Beast (1974): Suzuki's convent film, filed under nunsploitation as well.
• Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (1974): a Division 0 killer cop, with Miki Sugimoto at her hardest.
• Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970): Nikkatsu rather than Toei, but the girl-gang picture that pinky violence grew up beside.

The problem

These are exploitation films. Sexual violence is a recurring device and the camera is not neutral about it. They are also films where a woman methodically destroys the institutions that abused her, made during a period of Japanese student and feminist militancy, and shot with a formal ambition that has nothing to do with how they were sold. Ito's work on Scorpion belongs in a different conversation than the marketing.

Common confusion

The label centres on Toei's line. Independent pinku eiga and Nikkatsu's Roman Porno are separate shelves, and Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973) is a yakuza film with no pink content. See yakuza and women in prison for the neighbouring shelves.

Where to start

The three Ito-directed Scorpion films. After he left, the series becomes ordinary very fast.

Sources

• Pink film, history section on Toei: Wikipedia, "Pink film", citing Chris D., Toei's Bad Girl Cinema (booklet to the Pinky Violence Collection DVD set, Panik House, 2005), and Patrick Macias, TokyoScope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion (Cadence Books, 2001).
• Meiko Kaji's career and the Scorpion and Lady Snowblood series: Wikipedia, "Meiko Kaji".