Criminal Woman: Killing Melody

I just watched another Pinky Violence film. It starts off with topless Japanese women dancing at a go-go bar in the 70's. I was hooked.

I first heard of this strand of Japanese sexploitation when I was researching foreign biker films. Sukeban Gerira was awesome so I thought I'd check out some more similar titles. Criminal Woman has half the bloody cast from Sukeban Gerira. I'm sure there's a lot of cross-over amongst these genre films. Reiko Ike and Miki Sugimoto are the big stars of the era. Here they are again, getting topless and fighting all the time. I gotta say, the violence was a lot better in Sukeban Gerira, and so was the sexploitation. But whatever, this was still entertaining!

This is a part yakuza / part women-in-prison film. Covering all the grindhouse bases. It's amazing how Japanese female prisons were filled with so many hot chicks in the 70's. Funny that...

The sound effects are ridiculous, the action is retarded, the plot is very straight-forward, the characters are archetypical...but it all works. Take it for what it is. The one genuinely redeeming artistic feature is the composition. The DP and Director do a great job framing everybody. It's like a chess game. Everyone moves into their spot perfectly and really uses the fore, middle and background spaces very effectively. They set up dynamic compositions. For all the campiness of the film, you can't deny the great composition of the shots. Definite artistic merit.

I'm not really into grindhouse per se, but the Japanese can't go wrong. I'll dig their grindhouse. I've got some more Pinky Violence flicks peppered into my Netflix queue. We'll see how many I watch before watching hot Japanese chicks from the 70's rip each others' shirts off gets stale...Yeah.