Nurse Diary: Wicked Finger (1979)

Nurse Diary: Wicked Finger is a 1979 entry in Nikkatsu’s roman porno cycle, the studio’s successful strategy to save itself from bankruptcy after television had threatened to destroy the Japanese film industry. Nurse Diary: Wicked Finger is a sex comedy, and a deliriously crazy one.

It’s one of quite a few nurse-themed movies in the roman porno cycle.

Ryoko (Etsuko Hara) is a pretty young nurse. She has decided to move out of the nurse’s dorm. She’s having an affair with a married doctor, Dr Edogawa, and she feels it may be indiscreet to have sex with him in the dorm.

Young student nurse Emi, who looks up to Ryoko as a surrogate big sister, has been resisting the lesbian advances of her new roommate. Emi does however seem to have discovered an interest in the delights of sapphic love and she’s now desperately trying to get into Ryoko’s pants.

Dr Edogawa has other things to distract him, in the form of a very pretty female patient named Yoko. Yoko is always developing strange symptoms which always require Dr Edogawa to give her a close physical examination. Naturally she has to take her clothes off for these examinations. If Yoko had a headache or a sore toe she would insist on taking her clothes off so that Dr Edogawa could examine her properly. Dr Edogawa is a dedicated physician so he always conducts these examinations very thoroughly, to the accompaniment of much giggling on Yoko’s part.

Dr Edogawa will have a bit of explaining to do when Yoko’s husband shows up.

Dr Edogawa also has some explaining to do when his wife finds out about his affair with Ryoko.

Ryoko has other distractions of her own to deal with, in the form of a young somewhat socially inept male neighbour named Tsugawa. Tsugawa is a Peeping Tom.

All of these sexual dramas become more and more crazy.

If you’re not familiar with Japanese comedy you might be surprised at just how broad much of the humour is. In this movie it’s very broad indeed, but combined with total insanity.

It is however genuinely very funny. Tsugawa’s misadventures with the vacuum cleaner are very funny indeed. As you might have guessed, he has turned to the vacuum cleaner to relieve his sexual frustrations brought about by gazing at Ryoko’s nakedness. It’s an episode that could easily have been merely crude but the craziness level makes it funny rather than crass.

In fact that’s typical of the whole movie. Situations with the potential to be crass end up being lightheartedly amusing instead.

The scenes with the crazy exhibitionistic Yoko manage to be both funny and sexy. The scenes with her husband are insanely over-the-top and including a fire-breathing Dr Edogawa. Literally fire-breathing. He’s been drinking pure alcohol and makes the mistake of trying to light a cigarette.

The movie does spring one or two surprises. We assume that Tsugawa is being set up as a perennial loser comic relief character with no chance of getting the girl (or any girl) but Ryoko decides he’s really sweet and she’s happy to sleep with him, even though she knows about the vacuum cleaner incident. The scene in which she sleeps with him would have been played for laughs in a British or American movie but in this case it’s oddly touching.

It’s these occasional unexpected poignant moments that make this movie interesting.

There’s a lot of nudity but overall this movie is a bit tamer than you expect from a Nikkatsu roman porno film.

Even scenes that might have been disturbing end up not being genuinely disturbing because the movie really is remarkably good-natured and is clearly aiming to amuse rather than to shock. This is an intentionally silly goofy movie and if you take any of it seriously you’ve missed the point.

Nurse Diary: Wicked Finger is totally nuts but it’s strangely likeable and even charming in its insanity. Recommended.

The Impulse DVD lacks extras (apart from some very sparse liner notes by Jasper Sharp) but the transfer is perfectly acceptable.

True Story of a Woman in Soapland: Tear! (1987)

True Story of a Woman in Soapland: Tear! is a 1987 Nikkatsu roman porno movie about a woman who works in one of Japan’s soaplands. Both the terms roman porno and soaplands are going to require some explanation.

By the beginning of the 70s the Japanese film industry was in desperate trouble, with television causing a collapse in cinema attendances. Studios realised that there were two things that would lure customers back to movie theatres - sex and violence. One result of this was the emergence of the pinky violence genre which offered both at the same time. Japan’s oldest film studio, Nikkatsu, took a slightly different approach. They came up with a genre which they called roman porno. This had nothing to do with the Roman Empire. The French term for an erotic novel is roman pornographique. Nikkatsu thought this would be a cool descriptive term for its new series of movies, but they shortened it to roman porno.

Nikkatsu went further. They cancelled all other film production and from 1971 to 1988 they made nothing but roman porno movies. It was a spectacularly successful strategy and it saved the studio, which is still going strong today. They made hundreds of these films.

Many of these films are lighthearted goofy sex comedies. Others offer extraordinary levels of violence and kink. This one offers melodrama.

Now for that other term, soaplands. Prostitution was outlawed in Japan in 1958. Soaplands sprang up to fill the void. These were bathhouses. The customer paid to be bathed by a soap girl. This was quite legal. Technically this was the only service offered by the soaplands, so these businesses remained technically quite legal. Of course if, after the bath, the customer and the soap girl were overcome by tender passions and had sex that was no concern of the soapland. Of course in every single case the customer and the soap girl ended up having sex (and money managed to change hands) but it was done in a way that always managed to remain technically legal. The soap girls were in practice prostitutes and were very high-class and well-paid.

So, back to the movie. Kikuta is a schoolteacher and a happily married man and he has a mistress, a nurse named Mizue. She mentions that she saw an old friend of theirs from their schooldays, a woman named Hasekura, leaving a soapland. She was obviously working there. Mizue was a little shocked and a little amused. Kikuta had had an affair with Hasekura at school.

Kikuta decides to re-introduce himself to Hasekura. Their old passion immediately re-ignites.

The nurse girlfriend finds out and she’s outraged, even though she has a fiancé on whom she’s cheating.

Kikuta’s wife finds out about her husband’s little nurse girlfriend. She doesn’t have much respect for her husband but she won’t give him up because as she says he’s so easy to control.

Kikuta makes a solemn promise to Mizue to give up Hasekura and he makes a solemn promise to his wife to be faithful in future.

Of course he doesn’t keep either promise. Kikuta isn’t exactly a bad guy but he’s weak and he’s absolutely hopeless where women are concerned. He’s not the kind of guy you’d pick as a Casanova. He’s more like a naughty little boy. Maybe that’s why all three women want him.

The fact that Hasekura is a prostitute isn’t made into much of an issue. It really only figures in the plot to the extent that Hasekura has enough money to be able to offer to keep Kikuta as a kind of pet.

The ending is a surprise, to say the least. And it's certainly effective.

Director Takashi Kodama handles things pretty well and doesn’t allow the story to get bogged down at any point. All the cast members are more than adequate.

Japanese erotic movies tend to be both less graphic and more graphic than contemporary erotic films from the US or Europe. They’re less graphic in that because of a peculiar cultural taboo they couldn’t show any female pubic hair. On the other hand they could show stuff that you wouldn’t generally see in softcore offerings from other countries. The sex scenes in this movies are extraordinary intense and steamy, and sometimes soapy. And there are many many sex scenes.

This is a romantic-sexual melodrama and it works pretty well. The characters have enough substance (and enough tangled motivations) to keep our interest. True Story of a Woman in Soapland: Tear! is highly recommended.

The Impulse DVD offers a reasonable if less than stellar transfer.

Flight Attendant: Scandal (1984)

Flight Attendant: Scandal (subtitled Hold Me Like an Animal) is a 1984 Nikkatsu roman porno film.

“Pink films” (as the Japanese called erotic films) were a bit of a thing in Japan in the 60s but most were independent or modestly budgeted efforts. Much like American sexploitation films of the 60s they found a market and being cheap they could be quite profitable. All this changed in 1971 when Nikkatsu, a very major studio indeed, launched its “roman porno” cycle of pink films. All the big Japanese studios had been very heavily hit by competition from television. Nikkatsu not only decided that pink films would be its salvation, they decided to switch entirely to pink films. Between 1971 and 1988 roman porno films were what Nikkatsu made.

It was a spectacularly successful move. It saved the studio, which is still thriving today.

Nikkatsu’s approach was to let its writers and directors do whatever they wanted, as long as the resulting film contained the necessary quota of nudity and sex. This made the writers and directors pretty happy. They could be as commercial or as arty as they wished. They could pick whatever genre they liked. They could make these films without suits from the front office breathing down their necks. Even better, they had all the facilities of a major studio at their disposal and reasonable budgets to work with.

As a consequence the roman porno films were incredibly varied. Most were successful with the public and some attracted very favourable attention from critics.

In spite of the extreme variety of these films it’s possible to divide them very broadly into two categories. The first comprised movies that relied on extreme sexual violence. The second category comprised sex comedies which tended to be goofy, good-natured and often totally insane. The Flight Attendant films definitely belong in the sex comedy category.

The movie focuses on four Japanese flight attendants (so the formula is superficially similar to Roger Corman’s 1970s stewardess and nurse movies). Most of the focus is on Misako. She’s a sort of chief stewardess. She’s suddenly developed a fear of flying, along with with some odd sexual fantasies. Her boyfriend is a pilot but the relationship gets a bit rocky when she comes home to find him with his face buried between the thighs of her flatmate (who was so drunk at the time she didn’t even know what was happening). A fortune teller tries to cheer Misako up but without success. His prediction about her future will however prove to be significant.

Our four flight attendants spend most of their off duty time getting drunk and having sex, sometimes on outrageous circumstances. They also do some skeet shooting which provides some of the film’s best comic moments. These gals are kinda dangerous with guns, especially when they’re excited.

There’s a subplot involving drug smuggling which will end up becoming unexpectedly related to Misako’s romantic problems. A couple of the girls get to ply hostess to some drunken salarymen, which ends as you’d expect. Flight attendants are very friendly girls.

Misako has a therapist but his methods are a little unconventional. At least I think that feeling up your female patients is usually regarded as unconventional. He’s treating her for her sexual hangups but his sexual kinks are way more extreme than hers.

Misako also encounters a coffee fetishist. It’s not a sexual fetish. He’s just obsessed with making the perfect cup of coffee. In fact he seems to find this more interesting than sleeping with her, which doesn’t please her too much.

Japanese movies were not allowed to show pubic hair at this time. You might think that as a result a Japanese erotic movie would be just a little tame compared to its contemporary British, American and European counterparts. If you do think that then you’re seriously underestimating the Japanese. Even with this restriction they could make an erotic movie that was more sexually raw and in its own way more sexually explicit than most British, American and European softcore offerings of that period. In fact in some ways the restriction was an advantage. It made Japanese directors work harder to achieve the necessary erotic charge. This is a very sexy movie.

The craziness is not as extreme in this movie as in some Japanese movies but there’s plenty of low-key weirdness.

Is it funny? I think that will depend on your tastes. Much of the humour is obviously very Japanese (and very broad) but yes it does have some amusing moments and it is pleasingly goofy and good-natured. In fact it’s very good-natured. There’s even some romance, mixed in with all the frantic coupling.

The Impulse DVD is barebones. It’s in Japanese with English subtitles. It’s a reasonable anamorphic transfer.

Flight Attendant: Scandal provides some fun if you’re in the right mood.

Momoe’s Lips (1979)

Momoe’s Lips is a 1979 entry in Nikkatsu’s “roman porno” series, the Japanese studio’s attempt to find a way to tempt audiences back to movie theatres by offering them something that television just couldn’t offer - outrageous helpings of sex and sleaze. They churned out an immense number of these films and they were hugely successful. The roman porno movies fell into two broad categories - goofy sleazy sex comedies and incredibly nihilistic sex and violence epics. Momoe’s Lips is about as nihilistic and sleazy a film as you’ll ever hope to see. Perhaps I should add that the original title was Rape Shot: Momoe’s Lips.

Tôru Miyake (Noriaki Abe) is a journalist working for a scandal sheet. His specialty is scandals involving the entertainment business. It pays well if you have no ethics and don’t mind being the journalist equivalent of a cockroach, and Tôru cheerfully describes himself as a cockroach.

He’d like to go after Momoe but going after her could be very injurious to one’s health. That’s the only mention of Momoe in the movie. Apparently it refers to a real-life pop star. I’m sure she was thrilled to have her name associated this film, and even more thrilled by a slightly later film called, wait for it, Molester Train: Momoe’s Butt.

Tôru decides instead to go after Yôko Miki (Minako Mizushima). She’s the latest singing sensation and her career is being managed by Mr Hoshino. There are rumours that Hoshino keeps his young female singing stars pliable by pumping them full of drugs. Tôru thinks he has a way of finding out if this is true or not (we’ll come back to this later).

Tôru discovers that poking his nose into Mr Hoshino’s business can be pretty injurious to one’s health as well.

Then Yôko gets kidnapped. Tôru isn’t sure whether it’s some stunt on Mr Hoshino’s part of if the kidnappers are part of someone else’s scheme or whether they’re just crazies. He doesn’t care. There’s a great story in this and that will improve his bank balance.

Tôru thinks he can get a lead from a friendly whore. He doesn’t get the information he wants but she does give him a good time. And at discount rates.

Meanwhile Yôko is not having a good time. She’s getting raped by three crazies, including an odd young man known as Dragonfly. Dragonfly is actually a big fan of Yôko’s. He has all her records. He worships her. That doesn’t stop him from raping her. Some fans do carry things a bit too far.

There’s one thing that puzzles Tôru. He is convinced that Yôko is injecting drugs (or perhaps is being forcibly injected with drugs) but he can’t find any needle marks on her. And he examined every square inch of her body. Yes, every square inch. Yes, even there. No needle marks. In fact Yôko is being injected with drugs but the method by which it’s done provides one of the movie’s many shocking moments.

Tôru figures, correctly, that Mr Hoshino will pay a lot of money to get Yôko back. He’s willing to pay five million yen. Returning her to Mr Hoshino probably is not doing the girl any favours but five million yen is five million yen.

The violence is non-stop. It’s not just the crazy kidnappers and Mr Hoshino’s goons getting violent. Other extraneous characters wander into the film simply for the purpose of beating up Tôru or getting beaten up by him. There’s a lot of sex, some of it consensual. Even the consensual sex is fairly sleazy. You may want to take a shower after watching this movie. The rape scenes are not particularly graphic but they are shocking and brutal. If you’re sensitive to such things then this is not the movie for you.

Tôru may be the most unsympathetic protagonist in cinema history. He’s not an anti-hero, he’s just a sleazebag. There are no heroes in this story. Just nasty cynical violent people out for their own interests. The ostensible heroine (or victim) is not exactly a paragon of virtue either.

It’s a movie that does manage to go places that I personally had never even thought of. When Tôru follows Yôko into the ladies’ room, follows her into the stall, slams her up against the wall and pulls her panties down you figure you know what’s going to happen next. And you’d be totally wrong. What he’s actually trying to do is collect a urine sample from her. He’s performing a kind of impromptu drug test.

Director Katsuhiko Fujii does a pretty solid job, adding a few nice visual flourishes.

The acting is more than adequate. These are not nice characters but Noriaki Abe and Minako Mizushima manage to give Tôru and Yôko just a little bit more depth than you’d expect.

Once you get past the sex and nudity there’s an effective and nasty little hardboiled crime story here with some very noir touches.

The Impulse DVD offers a very good anamorphic transfer. The only extra is in the shape of liner notes from Jasper Sharp.

There are sleazier roman porno films but I’m not sure there are any that are more thoroughly nihilistic than this one. But if you’re in the mood for sleaze and nihilism Momoe’s Lips is recommended.

Fairy in a Cage (1977)

Fairy in a Cage, written and directed by Kôyû Ohara, is perhaps the most notorious of the long series of roman porno movies made by Japan’s Nikkatsu Studio between 1971 and 1988. It should be explained that these movies have nothing to do with the Romans - the French term for an erotic novel is roman porno and I guess someone at Nikkatsu though it sounded classy.

In the latter stages of World War 2 the Japanese military police are cracking down on anti-war activists. Judge Murayama takes an active hand in the interrogations, especially of female suspects. He is considered to be a specialist in this area. Murayama’s idea of interrogation involves torture with definite sexual overtones.

There is however considerable doubt as to whether any of these female suspects is guilty of anything more than catching Murayama’s eye. He has now picked out his next victim, the young and very beautiful wife of a rich jeweller named Kikushima. There is not the slightest evidence against her but Murayama really wants to torture her. So evidence is manufactured implicating Mrs Kikushima and a kabuki actor named Sennosuke Inoue.

The first stage of Murayama’s interrogation technique is to tell Mrs Kikushima to take all her clothes off. At this stage she realises she’s in a for a rather unpleasant time.

Murayama works closely with the military police and in this case a new recruit, Lance-Corporal Taoka, will be taking an active part in the interrogations. Also taking an active rôle is Murayama’s young assistant and mistress Kayo. Taoka isn’t happy with the situation at first, then he starts to enjoy it and then he starts to become sexually obsessed with Mrs Kikushima. It is implied that Taoka is sexually inexperienced and may even be a virgin. He is definitely somewhat disturbed sexually. When it is suggested that he should pleasure himself with some whores he gets very uncomfortable. He is perhaps a little bit afraid of women.

Young Kayo takes charge of the torture of Inoue, the kabuki actor. Her idea of torture is to force Inoue to have sex with her and to force him to endure the horrors of fellatio. That would certainly be enough to break any man’s spirit, especially given that Kayo is young and very pretty. Yes, this is one very strange movie.

Taoka’s sexual obsession why Mrs Kikushima grows, He even contemplates rescuing her. He is however not quite a knight in shining armour. His idea is to get her out of the clutches of Murayama so that he can have for himself and rape her at his leisure. Taoka is not a healthy young man.

Murayama and the military policemen are clearly exceptionally depraved (they really really enjoying torturing attractive young women) and young Kayo is perhaps even more depraved. Her hobbies include forcing men to submit to sex, watching other women get tortured and humiliated and having Murayama tie her up (he has to make sure that the ropes really hurt her) before pleasuring her.

OK, so this sounds like a straightforward S&M software porno movie. But this was the 1970s, a time when film-makers in various countries were getting very attracted to the idea of making movies about the relationship between power and sex. More specifically playing with the idea that power leads to moral corruption which then leads to sexual depravity. Or perhaps that the sexually depraved are attracted by power, especially absolute power over others. In Italy Tinto Brass explored this idea in Salon Kitty and it was his original idea for Caligula (although Caligula as released bore little resemblance to Brass’s original conception). These ideas are perhaps vaguely plausible and they certainly had possibilities for movie-makers who could make S&M movies and then claim that they weren’t making just making porn movies - they were making movies that were serious political statements.

Fairy in a Cage is very obviously exploring these same ideas. Its main weakness is that it doesn’t offer us much insight into the psychology of the two most interesting character, Murayama and Kayo. Taoka is a bit more fully developed. It seems likely that he is only aroused by women when they’re under his power.

Minoru Ôkôchi’s performance as Murayama is extremely good and Rei Okamoto is extraordinary as Kayo. Kayo is not a girl you’d want to take home to meet Mother.

Naomi Tani has to be given credit for volunteering to undergo some pretty extreme bondage, much of which apparently was genuinely painful. She’s a gorgeous woman but to be honest she’s essentially just a prop. She’s merely an innocent victim, Naomi Tani does a good job enough job conveying her fear and her humiliation, but we know no more about her at the end than we knew at the beginning. The focus here is on the psychology of the torturers (both the male and female torturers).

Fairy in a Cage was based on a story by Oniroku Dan, a very successful writer of S&M erotica and a close friend of the film’s star Naomi Tani. She had already established herself as an actress in pink films (Japanese erotic movies) but her appearance in numerous adaptations of Dan’s stories for Nikkatsu made her a star and Japan’s queen of cinematic S&M.

Fairy in a Cage is, like all of Nikkatsu’s roman porno movies, very well-made (Nikkatsu was and is a major studio) and it looks great. It was, predictably, controversial at the time. Which is hardly surprising. It is pretty extreme. While the political subtext is definitely there this movie is really more of an exploration of the psychology and eroticism of sadomasochism. So it really is, quite unashamedly, a softcore S&M erotic movie. Which is of course exactly what Nikkatsu wanted. So whether you enjoy this movie depends entirely on your feelings about S&M erotica. If the subject matter doesn’t bother you then it has some claims to being, along with Just Jaeckin’s The Story of O and Radley Metzger’s The Image, one of the classics of the genre. And you can always pretend that you only watched it for the political subtext!

Female Teacher: In Front of the Students (1982)

Female Teacher: In Front of the Students is a 1982 entry in Nikkatsu’s roman porno cycle.

Reiko (Rushia Santô) is a new teacher at a tough high school. Her male students are rowdy and uncouth and the girls aren’t much better. Unfortunately Reiko doesn’t quite have what it takes to win their respect. Then one day, in the female teachers’ locker room, she is raped by one of her male students. She does have one clue to her assailant’s identity - a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that he dropped in the shower while raping her.

Reiko has her suspicions as to the rapist’s identity and decides to do some investigating. She thinks it might have something to do with her decision to drop one of the boys from the school tennis team. Rather unwisely she allows one of her female students, Kumi, to help her. Kumi has already tried to initiate Reiko into the joys of lesbian sex. Kumi suggests breaking into her boyfriend Takuya’s house to look for evidence and as a result Reiko not only gets raped again, she gets held prisoner and subjected to various indignities. And she learns that tennis racquets can be used for all sorts of sexual purposes. Takuya rapes her and Kumi, not to be outdone, rapes her as well. For Reiko it’s a weekend of humiliation and degradation and the most humiliating part is that the orgasms are so good. 

She also suffers the worst sexual indignity that any woman can be subjected to - having tennis balls hurled at her. I honestly had no idea that there was such a thing as tennis as a sexual fetish but it seems that there is.

Apart from countless sex scenes there is a mystery plot here. Reiko still doesn’t know who raped her the first time. She’s obsessed by the idea of finding the answer. She still has that jigsaw puzzle piece but the problem is that it seems that jigsaw puzzles are popular with all the men in this town. The piece turns out to be, fittingly, part of a female thigh from a Modigliani nude. 

 

She discovers that one of the downsides of being an amateur detective is that you get raped a lot. The upside is that sometimes the getting raped part is pretty good. And her friend Shoko assures her that all women like the idea of being raped. Well Shoko likes the idea anyway. 

As you may have gathered this is is not a movie that could even remotely be described as politically correct. If that bothers you, or if the idea of a movie that revolves largely around rape bothers you, then don’t even think about seeing this movie. 

Rushia Santô as Reiko is a capable enough actress and she’s a very lovely lady and she spends a sizeable part of the film’s running time naked. Rina Oka as the breathtakingly depraved Kumi is very impressive and also frequently naked. Kyôko Sagami plays Reiko’s friend Shoko and yes, she gets to take her clothes off as well. If extraordinarily beautiful nude women are something that appeals to you then this movie delivers the goods on that front. It might seem strange to say that a movie mostly about rape is a very female-centric movie but that’s the case. It’s not that the male actors aren’t competent but the focus is on the women.

As with all the Nikkatsu roman porno movies it’s all softcore and there’s no frontal nudity but the sex scenes are quite intense (and sometimes disturbing) and the three lead actresses don’t keep their clothes on for very long.

Yasuaki Uegaki spent most of his career as a director making pink films and he certainly knew how to shoot sex scenes. Apart from that he manages a few atmospheric scenes in the deserted school buildings that almost have a gothic hint to them.

Nikkatsu was a major Japanese studio and their roman porno movies tended to be well made with fairly high production values. This film is no exception.

Impulse’s DVD offers a good anamorphic transfer. There are no extras apart from a trailer but there are liner notes by pink film guru Jasper Sharp.

Nikkatsu made a whole series of Female Teacher films, all of them being unrelated apart from featuring female teachers and sex.

Female Teacher: In Front of the Students is very sleazy but it’s sleaze with a certain amount of style, and with hints of the weirdness that makes Japanese exploitation movies so fascinating. The plot does have a few twists and there’s even a love story although it’s a sleazy love story. Mostly it’s a dark sex thriller and as such it’s highly recommended.