Hell Hath No Fury...
There's nothing I can say that would've prepared you for this one...

In an effort to keep things moving right along, today we're doing a two-fer.

I can't even think of an intro...other than I've found my alternate wold heaven...as in the reality I would choose outside of this one: the movie world of 60's/70's Japanese cinema. Now that's not because I'm some loser Asianophile. You know, the chunky dork who watches too much animé and talks about the code of the samurai and tries to know more about Asian culture than any Asian man or woman within 20 miles of him. I'm not that guy...from what you know of me here you may think I'm that guy...but I'm not that guy. I've just found that it's a movie world that every time I enter it, I find that I have a badass good time. It's sexy and stylish. It's violent and garish. It can be soft and hard. It doesn't matter if it's sword swinging samurai or gun toting gangsters...or any of other smaller genres...it's usually a pure hoot.

Actually, the same could be said for a lot of 60's American cinema...it's just that the Japanese is almost always...what's the word?...zanier? Sure. Zanier.

That having been said. Here's a couple that prove that you can have lots of sex AND violence while still telling a story.

Sex and Fury (1973, d. Norifumi Suzuki) & Female Yakuza Tale (1973, d. Teruo Ishii)

The Story (One): Pickpocket extraordinaire and gambler Ocho Inoshika seeks revenge against the criminals who killed her father who have now become powerful politicians.

The Story (Two): Ocho Inoshika returns to take down a murderous drug smuggling ring to pay back a debt of honor to a yakuza boss who saved her life.

The Review: Hmmm, I wonder if my synopsis are fair. Both of these movies' plots play out a touch more complicated than I've made them sound, but if you strip it down then the above is what you are left with. I'll try to explain without having to get into a play by play.

The first film features a whole political subplot with a crazed anarchist band and a pair of European spies along with a whole subplot of Ocho trying to rescue a young girl from being sold into prostitution all while trying to solve who killed her father. And the second had three different rival gangs, each of which has different goals and a strange murder/mistaken identity subplot. And like I said, they then sped along chockful of violence and nudity and sex and torture and what have you.

It was all about balance.

The problem is that most movies like this (and the Japanese have been guilty of this more than once (espicially if you watch enough animé) is that they almost fall into formula. What I mean is that it gets to the point where you can start timing things off. For instance, there's going to be a gunfight ever 5-6 minutes, a sex scene every 10, and so on. Another fine example of this kind of filmmaking would be a personal guilty favorite: Andy Sidaris. I'm sure I've mentioned him here before, but for those of you who missed out I'll repeat. If you've seen Savage Beach, Return to Savage Beach, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, or Do or Die, you know exactly what to expect and when. You could probably jot down the timing of the sex scenes and violence for one movie, then pop another one in, and without watching just fast forward to those same numbers and you'd have the same corresponding scenes. (Come to think of it...that's an experiment I oughtta try...)

I'm happy to say that though there is something noticeably familiar about the timing and delivery both of these movies keep chucking enough style and crazed concepts to keep you guessing. For instance, there are scenes with nudity in any of a thousand different movies, but how many of them are slow-mo choreographed bloodbaths in the snow with a naked woman hacking and slashing through two dozen assassins? I bet you could name all of them on one hand that lost a couple of fingers in an industrial accident.

But it's not all...pardon the expression...milk and honey.

Now I've looked up some reviews and opinions on these movies, as I do with most everything I review (assuming I can find anything), and the majority opinion out there is that Female Yakuza Tale is the better movie. Now both of them feature a naked Ocho fighting for her life against mulitple assassins. For whatever reason, which is hard to explain and justify, in the first film it didn't seem exploitave (or as exploitave) as it did in the second one. Of course, in the second film, the naked swordfight was the back drop for the opening credits! When you start with something like that, you can't let up. With little exception, the first move does a decent job of motivating its violence and nudity....the second one...well...

The first movie definitley takes itself both more seriously and stylishly. The second tries to have more fun, and takes on a more over-the-top comic book tone that verges on slapstick. This may betray a bias on my part since I have a strong feeling against the tongue-in-cheek tone most movies have today. It's not hard to see how or why something so maniacal could slide so fast into self-parody. The problem for me, once again, is what I refer to as post-Airplane syndrome. Airplane, for all its lunacy, works only because it's played completely straight. Take away the jokes and it's a top-to-bottom disaster movie. That's why it works. Most movies that followed in that vein, however, spend so much time acknowledging their stupidity that it isn't remotely funny anymore. Female Yakuza Tale isn't quite that ridiculous, but without the "we're taking this very seriously" tone...it just doesn't work for me. It's too self-consciously jokey...and as I mentioned before, exploitave.

As this is a family site...uh, yup...I don't want to go into graphic detail, but the movie uses a rather...um...well, somewhat different way, in a movie for smuggling drugs. I'll simply say, it ends up being an excuse for a bevy of young woment to get naked over and over and over again. Now, I imagine, in some respects, this could be titillating if it weren't for the now general knowledge that this and even more umcomfortable way of smuggling illegal goods are commonplace. Nevertheless, like I said, it becomes a sort of boring excuse to have naked girls on screen regularly. And just like anyone who has managed to watch a porno movie all the way through, like say an early entry like Deep Throat, the nudity for the sake of nudity loses it's novelty after a while and simply becomes sad.

So I choose Sex & Fury as the better of the two, but that's not to say it's flawless. I've always wondered why the caucasian actors in Asian films are always the absolutely worst actors in the universe. This one is no exception. Christine Lindberg (famous Swede from Thriller: A Cruel Picture (aka. They Call Her One Eye)) is passable, but her male counterpart is...well, I'm not sure you can call it acting. On the flip side, I'm not sure if that's because he wasn't an actor, or that he was directed to yell at the top of his lungs. In any event, he's terrible. So there's that, and the fact that Christine's love interest plot with the young handsome anarchist really goes nowhere except to add a sort of pretty soft side to the movie.

Wow, I feel like I've said a lot of negative things about these movies which wasn't how I meant to come across. I enjoyed both of them for the most part, but I definitely found the first to be more entertaining, stylish, and fun. Like I said, it's a splashy, colorful, intense world that I would long to be a part of. Well, only if it was like a restart version of life where everytime some beautiful naked girl with a sword hacked me to pieces I got to get up and do it all over again tomorrow.

Cheers.