Tokugawa Sex Ban (1972)

Tokugawa Sex Ban AKA The Erotomaniac Daimyo (The Lustful Lord) is a 1972 Japanese exploitation movie from Toei Studios. Although it was written and directed by one of the masters of the pinky violence genre, Norifumi Suzuki, it’s not actually a pinky violence movie. It’s a combination of costume drama and sex comedy. And since it is a Norifumi Suzuki movie it does include a great deal of inspired craziness. A very great deal.

The setting is Japan in 1825, during the Tokugawa Shogunate. The current shogun has 54 children so as you’d expect finding suitable wives and husbands for all of them is quite a challenge. The immediate problem is the Princess Kyohime (Miki Sugimoto). Finally it is decided that Lord Tadateru Ogura (Hiroshi Nawa) would be a suitable match.

This lord is not pleased at the prospect. He is a middle-aged virgin with zero desire to marry. The princess for her part is unhappy about having to live in Kyushu which she considers to be a kind of barbaric hicksville.

She’s been doing some research on a wife’s marital duties, perusing instructional manuals on the subject. She is concerned that some of the positions look rather uncomfortable but overall she’s looking forward to losing her virginity.

Sadly her wedding night is a major disappointment. The bliss she anticipated does not eventuate.

This is a problem for Lord Ogura. If the shogun finds out that his daughter is disappointed in her husband he is likely to be very annoyed.

Lord Ogura’s chief advisor decided that his lord needs to undergo some intensive training. His lack of sexual prowess is due largely to inexperience. The advisor has three young lady assistants who undertake his training, He also has a secret weapon. It has just arrived in a crate from Paris. It is a French Doll. The doll is in fact a gorgeous French babe, Sandra (Sandra Julien). Soon Lord Ogura is obsessed with her.

This does not solve the princess’s problem.

Lord Ogura comes up with a fiendish plan. If he cannot enjoy connubial bliss then no-one will. He bans sex throughout his domain.

After this the movie gets more and more bizarre. It’s pointless to try to describe what happens. You have to see it to believe it and when you’ve seen it you still won’t believe it.

Fans of Norifumi Suzuki’s movies will know that he had a bit of an obsession with Catholicism. That obsession figures in this movie, in ways that make very little sense.

As a sex comedy it is very very funny although in a totally deranged way. It should be mentioned as an aside that sex comedies are something the Japanese do extremely well.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is the feel of the movie. Many of the sets have a kind of fairy tale feel and there are scenes that look like they’re shot through the proscenium arch of a theatre. There is a play within a play. With the voiceover narration as well it appears that Suzuki was aiming for a fairy tale or folk tale or storybook feel.

The subject matter certainly suggests that Suzuki intended the movie to be a satirical comment on censorship. There’s also a bizarre seppuku scene, this coming just a couple of years after celebrated Japanese writer Yukio Mishima’s pubic act of seppuku.

Tokugawa Sex Ban is wild and crazy but it’s pleasingly oddball and it’s sexy and it’s funny and it’s highly recommended.

The movie looks lovely on Mondo Macabro’s Blu-Ray release. There’s an excellent exhaustively detailed audio commentary by Jasper Sharp.

Norifumi Suzuki made some extraordinary movies including several featuring Miki Sugimoto, most notably Sex and Fury, Girl Boss Revenge (Sukeban, 1973) and Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom.

Sandra Julien was clearly cast in this movie after the successful Japanese release of I Am a Nymphomaniac (1971).

OSS 117 Double Agent (1968)

Pas de roses pour OSS 117 (OSS 117 Double Agent, OSS 117 Murder for Sale) was the sixth of the eight French eurospy movies made between 1956 and 1971 based on the popular novels of Jean Bruce.

For this movie John Gavin took over the role of Agent OSS 117. CIA Agent OSS 117 is Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, of French descent but American-born.

A shadowy organisation has been masterminding political assassinations. OSS 117 has to infiltrate the organisation by posing as a notorious hitman named Chandler. He does so successfully. The given him another new identity, James Mulligan. To avoid confusion I’ll just refer to him as OSS 117 throughout.

The leader of the assassination organisation, the Major (Curd Jürgens), gives him a tough assignment to prove his mettle and his loyalty. He has to kill a United Nations official Heinrich Van Dyck who is brokering a peace deal between two warring factions in the Middle East. The assassination will wreck the peace deal and this will benefit the powerful interests who are behind the Major.

It starts slowly and at first it’s all a bit predictable. Secret agents posing as assassins is a familiar enough spy/crime trope.

It gets more interesting when OSS 117 meets the girl. Of course there’s a girl and of course she’s beautiful. Her name is Aïcha Melik (Margaret Lee). She’s the daughter of a rich banker. It doesn’t take much to get OSS 117 interested in pretty girls and he gets even more interested when for some inexplicable reason the bad guys instruct him to keep away from her.

Of course you never know if beautiful girls will turn out to be delightful companions or evil lady super-spies. That’s what makes beautiful girls so enticing.

The vaccine he is given is one of the nicest touches in the movie. It’s a time-lapse killer vaccine. If he isn’t given the antidote regularly he’ll drop dead. It’s a good way to keep new employees in line. It allows for the introduction of another villain, a sinister doctor.

A couple of goons have been tailing the girl. They could be working for the Major or for some other faction or could even be good guys. It doesn’t matter. It gives OSS 117 the chance to do the protective hero thing. Chicks always go for that. Pretty soon Aïcha thinks OSS 117 is a total dreamboat.

Thee are double-crosses going on and there’s the Major’s vicious henchman Karas to worry about. Karas took an immediate and intense dislike to OSS 117.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with the plot. It just doesn’t have quite enough twists and quite enough interest. It’s a bit too routine.

The fight scenes are done well but it needed at least one reasonably cool action set-piece and sadly it never eventuates. It’s like an aircraft that taxies along the runway but never quite manages to get airborne.

This movie has the cosmopolitan feel of so many 1960s/70s European genre movies. It’s a French movie with an American leading man, an English leading lady, a German actor as the villain and several Italian supporting players. John Gavin is quite OK. Margaret Lee is adorable and charming and is really the best thing in the movie. Curd Jürgens was a great actor and should have made a terrific super-villain but the Major never becomes the colourful larger-than-life presence that was needed. Look out for Rosalba Neri and Luciana Paluzzi in small roles.

Eurospy movies could not match the budgets or the spectacles of the Bond movies. The best of them, such as Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966) and Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill (1966), make up for this by adding inspired craziness, surreal touches and lots of style. OSS 117 Double Agent by comparison is too straightforward which means that you notice the limited budget.

It’s all pretty tame. No nudity. Very restrained violence.

OSS 117 Double Agent is perfectly decent entertainment but for me it’s one of the weaker entries in the series. It’s still worth a watch if you buy the five-movie Kino Lorber boxed set (on both Blu-Ray and DVD) and if you’re a eurospy fan you simply must buy it. The transfers are excellent. It’s a real treat to see such movies decently presented in their correct aspect ratios and looking so good.

I’ve also reviewed the really excellent OSS 117: Mission for a Killer (1965) and OSS 117: Mission to Tokyo (1966).

Armitage III: Dual Matrix (2001)

Armitage III: Dual Matrix was released in 2001.

Something that needs to be clarified in regard to Armitage III: Dual Matrix right at the start is that this is not the third film in a series. It’s the second film in a two-movie series. It’s a sequel to Armitage III: Poly-Matrix. It’s called Armitage III because the heroine, Naomi Armitage, is a Third.

Armitage III: Poly-Matrix was in fact an OVA which was later edited into feature film format.

You need to have seen Armitage III: Poly-Matrix first, otherwise you won’t understand where the heroine is coming from and you won’t understand what she is. The background from the first film is that this is a world in which Mars has been colonised and has a large population of both humans and robots. Robots have become ubiquitous. The second-generation roots, known as Seconds, are useful for routine work. The Thirds, the third-generation robots, are a different matter. They are almost indistinguishable from humans, which makes many people uneasy.

Armitage was a cop working for the Martin PD, partnered with a human cop, Ross Sylibus.

Thirds have something very much akin to human emotions. Armitage knows she is a robot but she feels that she is also a woman.

As Armitage III: Dual Matrix opens Armitage is married (to Ross) and they have a daughter, Yoko. Yoko really is Armitage’s daughter. But Armitage is a robot. How can that be possible? It’s possible because Armitage is a Third. That’s the secret of the Thirds, the secret that has been closely guarded but now a sinister robotics tycoon is determined to get hold of that secret.

There’s also a move afoot to give robots legal rights. That has triggered a major political storm on both Earth and Mars.

There’s more to this struggle than is apparent on the surface. It has some connection to much earlier events, an apparently robot-inspired revolt known as the First Error.

It’s not just stubbornness that makes Armitage determined not to reveal the secret of the Thirds. It is vital that the secret remains a secret.

This is one of a number of cyberpunk movies (from Japan and elsewhere) dealing with the blurring of the line between humans and machines. In Blade Runner there’s Rachel who doesn’t know she’s a robot because she has her childhood memories (which are actually someone else’s memories). That’s her tragedy. In Ghost in the Shell Motoko has an entirely prosthetic body but she still has her (genuine) human memories. She still has her “ghost” - the essential human core of her consciousness - within the shell (the body). But she has to wonder if that’s enough to make fully human.

And here we have Armitage. She knows that she is a robot but she is a robot that may have crossed the threshold into consciousness. She feels things the way a woman feels things. But is she a woman?

One thing I love about the Armitage films is that Armitage is not a kickass action heroine who could just as easily have been a male character. Her femaleness is at the very core of the story. And being a mother is at the core of the story.

And although in the first movie Armitage and Ross start out having a kind of regular cop buddy movie relationship in this second film their relationship as husband and wife, and mother and father to Yoko, is crucial. This is what motivates all of their actions.

There is of course a vast amount of violent mayhem, done with energy and style.

By the mid-1980s anime dealing with complex grown-up subject matter was becoming a big thing. This was around the same time that cyberpunk was becoming the fashionable style of science fiction. In a way anime and cyberpunk grew up together. The Japanese took to cyberpunk like a duck to water. They loved the mood and the aesthetic.

By the time the first instalment of Armitage III came out in 1996 there had already been some great cyberpunk anime. Ghost in the Shell (1995) obviously but also Goku Midnight Eye (1989) and Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990). There’s also a slight cyberpunk flavour to the excellent Angel Cop (1989-94).

Armitage III: Dual Matrix is top-tier cyberpunk anime and it’s highly recommended.

I have the old Madman DVD which is sadly out of print.

Demon Witch Child (1975)

Demon Witch Child (La endemoniada) is a 1975 Exorcist rip-off written and directed by Amando de Ossorio. 

Amando de Ossorio made some fine creepy gothic horror such as the brilliant Blind Dead movies but he also made some wonderfully crazy tongue-in-cheek horror romps.

By 1975 everybody in Europe was making Exorcist rip-offs. This is a Spanish example.

There are moments in de Ossorio’s movie that are lifted directly from The Exorcist (the levitation, the head spinning the wrong way, the different voice coming from the child) but there are plenty of differences and there are moments in Demon Witch Child which in my view are creepier than anything in The Exorcist.

A local witch, a very old woman known as Mother Gautière, has been sacrificing children to the Devil. Now she’s taken possession of a young girl, Susan Barnes (Marián Salgado).

What follows is the kind of mayhem you expect.

Susan is the daughter of the police chief. He’s already under pressure from the press after the unsolved murder of another child. Reporter William Grant (Daniel Martín) is really going after him but they later become allies.

The old witch is arrested and that has fateful consequences.

Susan begins acting very strangely and disturbingly. It’s like she’s become a different person.

William’s fiancée Anne (who seems to be Susan’s governess) suspects demonic possession.

Father Juan (Julián Mateos) gets involved. He’s reluctant to admit it’s a case of possession. He has his own problems. Before entering the priesthood he was engaged to marry a girl named Esther (María Kosty). She was so upset at being dumped that she became a whore. Father Juan seems strangely indifferent to her fate. This subplot makes Father Juan slightly less sympathetic but also slightly more complex. And Esther is not out of the picture yet.

Mother Gautière, now in possession of Susan, has very nasty plans in store for both William and Anne. This leads to one of the movie’s big shock scenes in which poor William loses a vital part of his anatomy.

This is a movie that relies mostly not on actual gore but on horrifying ideas. What we don’t see can still shock us.

And it has a slightly surprising but rather effective ending.

This was a very low budget movie, shot in eight days, but the cheap special effects work very well and the makeup effects are excellent. The makeup effects on the young girl (I don’t want to give way spoilers but it involves the way the possession manifests itself) are incredibly creepy and effective.

The crawling down the wall scene is also nicely scary and weird.

It’s worth mentioning that the lead actress in this film, Marián Salgado, dubbed Linda Blair’s voice in the Spanish release of The Exorcist. Salgado gives an amazing performance here.

Demon Witch Child is odd in being rather low-key but also quite disturbing at times. I’m quite a fan of European Exorcist rip-offs and this one is recommended.

This film is part of a three-movie Blu-Ray set from Vinegar Syndrome, along with The Vampires’ Night Orgy (1973) and Curse of the Devil (1973). Demon Witch Child gets a very nice transfer with a number of extras.

I’ve also reviewed de Ossorio’s wildly entertaining The Loreley’s Grasp (1974) and the even more delightfully crazy The Night of the Sorcerers (1973).

If you’re a connoisseur of Exorcist rip-offs you’ll also want to check out Alberto De Martino’s The Antichrist.

Guns (1990)

Guns is a 1990 Andy Sidaris movie so you know what to expect. And it delivers the goods. By this time he had the formula humming along very nicely indeed. 

As usual his wife Arlene was the producer.

The cast of this one includes no less than six Playboy Playmates.

Donna (Dona Speir) and Nicole (Roberta Vasquez) are undercover federal agents in Hawaii. They stumble onto something big when an innocent girl is the vicim of what was clearly a professional hit. The girl just happened to be wearing the exact same dress as Nicole. The girls figure that Nicole was the intended target.

The hit was ordered by a Juan Degas (Erik Estrada), who has a special grudge against Donna. He didn’t want Donna hit. He wants her to suffer first, before he takes care of her himself.

Degas is involved in gun-running, using Molokai as a staging point. But the girls are cleverly decoyed to Las Vegas.

Degas is obsessed by his quest for revenge, just as much as protecting his gun-running racket.

Donna doesn’t know who is out to get her since she thinks Degas is dead. She also hasn’t realised that her mother, who happens to be the Attorney-General of Nevada, is going to get mixed up in all this.

The Feds organise a team to take down Degas. Naturally it includes a member of the Abilene clan, in this case Shane Abilene (Michael J. Shane). Like all male members of the family Shane is a staggeringly bad shot, a running gag in the series which will be used very cleverly and wittily towards the end.

The team also includes professional magician (and Federal agent) Abe. He gets a delightful scene involving some very unusual interrogation methods.

There has to be a bad girl and this time around it’s Cash (Devin DeVasquez) and she’s a formidable and coldblooded hitwoman.

Typically for a Sidaris movie the bad guys all look like bad guys and the sexy bad girl looks like a sexy bad girl. The good guys look like good guys. It’s cartoonish but it’s part of the Sidaris style and it adds to the fun. You don’t watch Andy Sidaris movies for moral ambiguity.

Like all of Sidaris’s movies this one is technically very polished which helps to make it look more expensive than it is. Guns is beautifully shot.

Andy and Arlene Sidaris had a positive genius not just for finding good locations but for using them efficiently and economically, and for getting added production values from those locations. If you shoot scenes in a luxury hotel your movie will have the right aura of money and glamour even though you’ve spent hardly any money.

Since this is an Andy Sidaris movie there are action scenes involving motorcycles, aircraft, ultra-light aircraft, helicopters and boats. And there will be explosions. There’s a cool scene where Donna is under aerial attack. If only she had a shoulder-launched multiple rocket launcher with her. Then she remembers - she does have a shoulder-launched multiple rocket launcher in the back of the van. Sensible girls don’t go anywhere without a multiple rocket launcher.

Sidaris knew how to do impressive action set-pieces that are clever and imaginative as well as exciting. This movie has some fine examples.

Guns is just non-stop action and mayhem with lots of extraordinarily gorgeous women who manage to be frequently topless. This is such a fun movie and it’s highly recommended.

Andy and Arlene provide another of their delightful audio commentaries.

Guns is included in the Mill Creek Girls, Guns and G-Strings DVD boxed set. The 16:9 enhanced transfer are lovely are there’s an audio commentary for every movie. Most of thee movies are now on Blu-Ray as well.

Black Tight Killers (1966)

Yasuharu Hasebe’s Black Tight Killers was released in 1966 and it’s one of those movies that is perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist. The Swinging 60s were underway. London wasn’t the only place that was swinging. Tokyo was definitely swinging as well. Black Tight Killers is a wild crazy Pop Art-infused thriller that includes everything you could possibly desire in a 60s movie.

Daisuke Hondo (Akira Kobayashi) is a globe-trotting photojournalist who always manages to be in the thick of the action and the danger. On his return flight to Tokyo he meets a very pretty stewardess, Yoriko Sawanouchi (Chieko Matsubara). They’re hitting it off really well until Yoriko is kidnapped. There’s a gang led by a hoodlum named Lopez after her but the beautiful girl ninjas are after her as well. Of course you can never be sure if girl ninjas will turn out to be evil girl ninjas or good girl ninjas.

It all seems to have something to do with Yoriko’s father and the disappearance of a huge stash of gold during the war.

From this point on there’s non-stop mayhem. Fortunately Hondo can handle himself pretty well and he’s spent time at the Momoko Ninja Research Station so he knows a few ninja tricks himself. Although the ninja chewing gum bullet trick does come as a surprise to him.

Yoriko keeps falling into the hands of assorted bad guys. Hondo is still trying to figure out which side the girl ninjas are on. They do seem inclined to offer him at least a temporary alliance.

Yasuharu Hasebe has been an assistant to Seijun Suzuki and that’s significant. This was the very year in which Suzuki made his crazed masterpiece Tokyo Drifter. It’s clear that Suzuki and Hasebe were working along very similar lines, with plot coherence taking a back seat to energy, very cool visuals, Pop Art style, wild use of colour and major flirtations with surrealism. Black Tight Killers, like Tokyo Drifter, takes place in its own universe. Realism pretty much goes out the window. And both films display an obsessive interest in the use of colour to undermine realism. There’s an obvious comic-book influence. And there are hints of the psychedelic freak-out elements which were becoming increasing a feature of late 60s movie.

There’s also go-go dancing.

I love the fact that some of the supposedly exterior shots were deliberately done in the studio and that in the frequent driving scenes the rear projection is obviously intended to look as artificial as possible.

The sets are cool but they’re made to look a lot cooler with very nifty lighting effects.

There are some odd tonal shifts. Mostly the emphasis is on super-charged hyper-kinetic action fun but then there are periodic dark tragic gut-punch moments.

There are also some cynical moments.

Akira Kobayashi is a serviceable action hero. Chieko Matsubara is cute and likeable.

The action scenes have plenty of energy.

The movie is as sexy as you could get away with in 1966, with some very brief glimpses of nudity.

Black Tight Killers was clearly much in tune with international trends in pop cinema. The Bond movies obviously, but it’s closer in feel to eurospy movies like the wonderful French Fantomas (1964) and the amazing Italian heist movie Seven Golden Men (1965), the thoroughly enjoyable Lightning Bolt (1966) and one of the best of all the eurospy films, Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966). And the German Kommissar X series kicked off in 1966 as well, with Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill.

And let’s face it - you can’t make a bad movie with beautiful girl ninjas.

Black Tight Killers has so much energy, so much fun and so much style. This is pure pop cinema. Highly recommended.

The Radiance Blu-Ray looks lovely. There are some decent extras.

Yasuharu Hasebe went on to direct several of the wonderful Stray Cat Rock movies - Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (1970), Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970) and Stray Cat Rock: Machine Animal (1970). These three movies are all quite different in tone but they’re all very enjoyable.