Hot Chicks In Black & White Flicks

I'm surprised someone didn't think of this sooner. Frankly, I wish I'd thought of this sooner. There's five of these on YouTube so far, posted just this month by SecretSauceTV.


12 ANGRY MEN



ON THE WATERFRONT


RAGING BULL

MIA on DVD: TWICE DEAD (1988)

D: Bert L. Dragin
W: Bert L. Dragin, Robert McConnell



Found this advertisement for the video release of the direct-to-video horror flick TWICE DEAD while skimming a small stash of bound-for-the-recycling bin home entertainment magazines for the various technology articles I've been posting in the past few days. I haven't seen this little B horror, actually, nor am I likely to, but I thought the packaging looked appropriately garish enough to share.

SUKEBAN BOY (Japan; 2006)

D:Noboru Iguchi
W: Noboru Iguchi, from the Manga by Go Nagai

WARNING: contains brief nudiness


Took a brief break from the wonderful world of Hong Kong Cinema today to watch the Hong Kong DVD of a shameless little gem from Japan called SUKEBAN BOY (2006).

Wow.

Gleefully twisted and but with tongue so firmly planted in cheek it's pushing through teeth and tendons and grue, Noboru Iguchi's adaptation of Go Nagai's Oira Sukeban manga, is a delightfully speedy, gloriously naked parody of schoolgirl fetish films so often found in Japanese erotic entertainment and, of course, a fetish film in its own right, I suppose.

The story is simple. Frequently beaten at a string of boys' schools because of his girlish features, gruff punk Sukeban (who's actually played by a girl, hardcore starlet Asami) is dressed in the traditional schoolgirl outfit and sent to a all-girls' school by his incestuous father.

There "she" encounters all sorts of villainy afoot, as well as Mochiko (fellow A/V porn starlet Emiru Momose) a new found friend with sapphic leanings who first takes her to the school's female embarrassent dojo, "The Club of Humiliation," which is actually a cover for the "Pan-Suto League" the in-house girl-gang that fights its battles in candy-coloured nylons over black thongs! From there, Sukeban must battle the "No-Bra League," whose leader Annie The Good spits bullets from a guerilla belt she wears across her enormous breasts; the "Hoichi League," three bald girls in fundoshi with kanji painted on their heads (in a nod to "Hoichi The Earless" from KWAIDAN); and the mysterious masked avenger of the naked Zen-su league, who doesn't take kindly to those who get too close to Sukeban. Peek-a-boo martial arts battles fought in varying stages of undress and increasing levels of TETSUO-style body-mutation gore ensue.

(In what I think must be a nod to the early work of Robert Rodriguez and his legendary EL MARIACHI "guacamole gun," clumps of bloody business are actually thrown at the actresses, some of whom are actually giggling. Mere seconds earlier, Sukeban's three male protectors hysterically slather handfuls of grue on each other when they're shot by organic weapons that have grown out of a woman's breasts!).

While Asami seems to be the only "actress" in the bunch with any even approaching reasonable thesping ability, the pouty, dead-eyed line-readings and awkward gestures of the rest of the female cast actually enhance to the dry wit present throughout. I haven't seen the two lead actresses at work in their rather sticky day jobs (no, really, I mean it!), and while there are no sex scenes in this piece, I suppose if you're going to film a comic book adaptation nonetheless brimming with gratuitous nudity, you won't be getting picking A-list stars.

Apprarently, this drew a good response when it screened at the 2006 Fantasia film festival in Montreal, but at 61 minutes and shot on video (and beautifully so, with faux letterboxing), this wasn't exactly bound for widespread distribution, so it's nice to see the HK DVD includes English subtitles, plus the original Japanese audio in both Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS. As a guaranteed cult item along the lines of the live-action WEATHER GIRL, though much less pretentious and made by people who are very much in on the joke and willing to splash as much nudity across the screen as is humanly possible, SUKEBAN BOY is cheeky fun.

Buy it At DDDHouse, if you dare!

SS HELL PACK TRIPLE FEATURE: Lest we forget the horrors of Nazi Germa -- hey, nice rack!

Trailer for SS EXPERIMENT LOVE CAMP

Three tedious Nazisploitation efforts, each largely indistinguishable from the vast majority of pictures in this genre.

SS GIRLS (1977), a SALON KITTY knockoff from the feeble mind of Bruno Mattei, is set in a secluded mansion wherein a crazy and debauched Nazi commander (Gabriele Carrara) employs prostitutes--each highly trained in ballet, weightlifting, fencing, gunplay and schtupping the spectrum of physically disgusting men--to lure unsuspecting Nazi traitors to their doom. The nudity quotient is high but the sex scenes, not unlike most of the male participants involved in them, are flabby, unrealistic and repetitive. And then there's some unpleasant business between a whore and a severely deformed man that, had this not been directed by one of the worst Italian directors of all time, would surely have engendered ill will. But with Mattei, it's tough not to have anything BUT ill will toward virtually everything he's ever done, so I suppose exploitation of the diseased should come as no surprise. The film is by design rather low on the torture and "cruelty" one associates with this genre, with even the mass suicide ending--which at last releases us from the company of these ridiculously smarmy actors--almost completely devoid of blood. In an interview included on the disc, Mattei reveals that he hates watching nearly all of his own films because he always sees many things he could have done better with more time and money. One would think that a director who worked extensively (and repeatedly) on low budgets and tight schedules would certainly not hurt for ingenuity, or style, as often as Mattei has, but such was not the case, if his long, depressing trail of visually ugly and sloppily plotted exploitationers is any indication.

Moving up a rung on the ladder of quality--arguably a lateral step, really, as the production value isn't much better--is Sergio Garrone's SS EXPERIMENT LOVE CAMP (1976), a once-notorious "video nasty" in England which features more full frontal nudity and butcher-meat-laced cruelty than the Mattei picture, though the romantic couplings are again rather uninvolving despite their showcasing far more attractive performers of both sexes. In this camp, ladies not chosen to improve the German race through ridiculous sex experiments are instead deemed fit for ridiculous medical experiments. (Garrone was known to do research for his films, so in all likelihood his onscreen experiments also happened in real life, and were equally as pointless) The film's key plot device--and arguably it's wildest asset--involves the camp commandant's desire for a new pair of testicles with which he can get a proper leg over for Der Fuhrer's greater glory, items duly (and seemingly unwittingly) removed from one of his officers. When good guy Helmut discovers he's a nut-free by-product of the Nazi machine just before mounting his love camp lovely, he races naked throughout the compound until he finds the duplicitous Colonel von Kleiben (Giorgio Cerioni, who looks very much like one of the puppets on Gerry Anderson's THUNDERBIRDS), furiously demanding to know "what have you been doing with my balls!?!" before inciting an all-out riot. Still, it's decidedly a case of parts surpassing the whole, as it tends to be with Nazi pictures that don't star Dyanne Thorne in a lead role.

The set concludes with Sergio Garrone's SS CAMP: WOMEN'S HELL, actually known as (and ID'd onscreen as) SS CAMP 5: WOMEN'S HELL. Exploitation Digital's sleeve for this dates it to 1977, though it's obvious Garrone shot it at the same time as SS EXPERIMENT LOVE CAMP using the same locations and most of the same cast in different roles. Garrone admits as much in the accompanying interview, and the comparatively stronger plotting, acting and action elements on offer suggest this was actually the first of the two pictures completed. Thanks to its meatier scenes of torture and medical experimentation, WOMEN'S HELL ventures closer to being a "video nasty" than LOVE CAMP, but then as now, it's tame stuff, notable mainly for introducing a Pam Grier blaxploitation vibe in the form of Rita Manna as the cunning Jamaican whore Alina, who takes advantage of besotted camp commandant Col. Strasser (Giorgio Cerioni, again sporting a THUNDERBIRDS coiffure and the plastic complexion to match) to plot the bullet-riddled liberation of her fellow prostitutes. Again, Garrone's superficial research informs the film's scenes of cruelty and degradation--including a cheap-but-effective optical that allows dead bodies to jerk and twitch in the camp's ovens (a trick used several times in LOVE CAMP as well)--but the vintage newsreel footage of actual Jews being stripped of their belongings and their lives sits uncomfortably amidst all the gratuitous boobs and beaver on display. But this was Italy in the 70's: "anything goes" was the cinematic order of the day, but cheap moralizing in a film such as this is offensive.

Thankfully, this thematically-challenged genre wasted away on the merits of films such as those included in this set. They're worth watching if you're new to the genre and want to see three average examples at a budget price rather than getting burned on the individual releases (which each cost nearly as much as this triple feature), but there are better examples out there, most notably ILSA: SHE WOLF OF THE SS. Extras on each disc include an interview with the respective director (running 10-15 minutes), meager still galleries, and selections of trailers, including some for other Nazisploitation titles.

BRAVEFUL POLICE (Taiwan/Hong Kong; 1990)

Nightclub wrestler To Gwai-fa meets with disapproval. Bet your local Amvets ain't got a show like this!

BRAVEFUL POLICE (Taiwan/Hong Kong; 1990)
D: Hon Bo-Cheung
This lesser-known Kara Hui vehicle should probably stay that way. It's a soapy thriller that looks like it was shot for free and sends the veteran martial artist to Tokyo where, with the help of a plucky prostitute (Yip Ka-ling) and a sexy lady wrestler (To Gwai-fa; don’t ask), she takes down the syndicate that’s squeezing her restauranteur uncle. Lotsa yap about displaced Taiwanese folk sticking together (all the girls hail from the island), but the only real highlight comes when Kara yanks the bikini top off a snooty roundeye peeler and tosses her into the audience at one of those only-in-a-Hong-Kong-movie nightclubs where well-dressed society couples gather to furiously applaud spastic stripteasing—and female wrestling—like it was a night at the friggin’ opera! Stay home. New wave band Berlin performs “Take My Breath Away,” though I’m fairly certain they’re not aware of it.

BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL (Japan; 2003)

BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL (Japan; 2003
D: Yudai Yamaguchi

This low-budget baseball zombie comedy is arguably a mixed bag, but one likely to develop a sizable cult following if it hasn't by the time you read this. While it successfully pokes fun at the clichés inherent in most sports movies, particularly those emotional cheats where spectators spontaneously applaud the most mundane, often personal actions of the main characters, it doesn't deliver on the action and gore quotient promised by the concept. And yet, as a budget-conscious live-action adaptation of a Shonen Jump manga, it plants tongue hard in cheek and certainly feels faithful to the source material, never for a minute taking itself seriously and gleefully indulging in the most eye-rollingly obvious visual gags.

Desperate to make it to the big leagues, the Seido High School baseball team must face their much more successful rivals at Gedo High, a team made up entirely of well-armed zombies. Their ace in the hole may well be transfer student `Jubeh The Baseball' (Tak Sakaguchi), whose signature fastball killed his own father, a tragedy which prevents him from helping the team. Directed by the writer of VERSUS (Yudai Yamiguchi), produced by that film's director (Ryuhei Kitamura) and starring that film's lead (Tak Sakaguchi), BATTLEFIELD shares that film's low-budget ingenuity, but wisely knows when to take up stakes and call it a day around the 90 minute mark. Can't speak for the R1 release of this title, but the Japanese R2 DVD I picked up has English subs and includes a hilariously inventive short film called Ramen Baka Ichidai, about a kid who hunts down the perfect Ramen noodles for his dying grandfather. Primo stuff.