Sex and Fury 1973 Film Review

“The Biography of the Woman Boss of Bad Girls...” [1]. A female yakuza film containing cult film fan favorite actresses Reiko Ike and Christina Lindberg, this film is a subgenre within subgenre within subgenre. The story follows Ocho, a gambling pickpocket swordswoman, who witnesses her father’s murder when she is a child. Twenty years later she is wandering around Japan searching for the three that are responsible. The only clues that she has are three Hanafuda playing cards that her father grabbed before he died. Like many Japanese Yakuza or Samurai films, Ocho gets involved with some other people along the way. This includes an anarchist and a white female spy. It’s a vengeance movie and there are swords, so what you can expect from this film is some violent displays of action with a fairly large amount of nudity.

This can be considered so many different subgenres of film. It could be sexploitation, samurai, yakuza, female yakuza, but it is commonly referred to as pinky violence. This was a series of Japanese films roughly from 1970 through 1974 that had a combination of “action, sex, violence and crime, and was dominated by ruthless and deadly delinquent females” [2]. This new subgenre had mostly been dominated by Toei studios, which by the mid-1960’s had begun to see an increase in the level of sleaze, “nudity, softcore sex and violent bloodshed” it was displaying in the films as a way to please an audience that was turning more to television [3].

Actresses Ike and Lindberg both had built their well known careers mostly off of movies that contained action and/or erotica in them. Ike was considered one of the pioneers of the Japanese Pinky violence genre, starring in four Terror Female High School films and five Sukeban or delinquent school girl films. Lindberg is known mainly for the Swedish cult film Thriller: A Cruel Picture, and also appeared in numerous Swedish erotica films. Director Norifumi Suzuki is credited with directing 56 films, which include Torakku Yaro and its 7 sequels, along with several other films in the Pinky Genre. He also wrote the script for Red Peony Gambler, which also ended up with 7 sequels.

Despite this being an exploitation flic, it is a beautifully shot with strong vivid colors and beautiful scenery. These were not amateur filmmakers throwing together some crap that has some tits in it; these were very talented artists with years of experience who simply were told they had to make a different type of film. There are many memorable scenes that will shock you, and then there are others that will please you from a cinematic end. Some scenes that are visually pleasing are the opening scene, where the father and daughter are walking on a road among a long row of orange and black bamboo stalks. Then there is the opening title sequence, which has Ocho displaying sword technique while in front of a large wall of Hanafuda cards. And one other scene involves a rape in a room that has a beautifully multicolored floor and the camera pans up and spins around; the colors are a great juxtaposition from the evilness of the rape.

If you like samurai, spraying blood, yakuza, or sexploitation films then you have to give this one a chance. And if you do like it, there are a large amount of other pinky violence films as well as straight period yakuza and samurai films worth checking out.