Sex and Fury / Furyo anego den: Inoshika Ocho (1973)

Rarely do we come across a movie whose title so accurately describes its contents as does Sex and Fury. That’s exactly what you get – a lot of fights mixed with a lot of nudity and sex scenes. Of course, that’s not quite the original title, which is something along the lines of “Fury of Elder Sister Inoshika Ocho.”

To try to discuss the plot in any detail would be a waste of time. Young Ocho sees her father the detective murdered in front of her eyes and she seeks revenge when she is grown, the clues being three hanafuda cards he picks up before he dies. Ocho (Reiko Ike) becomes a famous yakuza gambler and eventually finds her father’s killers, each identifiable by tattoos that match the father’s cards. Possibly because writing some dialogue would have been too much trouble, we have the completely unrelated plot of Christina, (Christina Lindberg) who had been to Japan and fallen in love but after returning to England found her only way to get back to her heart-throb was to become a spy/seductress in a plot to open Japan to British opium. Her lover, meanwhile, has become a radical trying to assassinate the big businessman who eventually is tied into the opium deal but who also has married Ocho’s mother while continuing his penchant for deflowering virgins and some occasional torture and is eventually revealed to be one of Ocho’s targets.

The main purpose is to move from blood to breasts to gunshots to breasts to rope to breasts and back to blood, breasts, rope, and gunshots all together in the final showdown. And there is no shortage of breasts or sex scenes, almost as many as in a real porno movie of the seventies but without the actual sex act being shown; there is even the lesbian show for the villain that eventually turns into a threesome.*

Ocho starts her nude fight

The most famous sequence actually comes at the beginning, when Ocho kills off a yakuza gang in a fight that started in her bath, so she fights nude, the fight shown in slow motion to make sure we can see every bounce of Ike’s breasts as she swings her sword, jumps, or is splashed with blood. But she gets some other nude scenes, along with three or four other Japanese actresses.

For Japanese audiences of the time, the exotic attraction was Lindberg, a Swedish model who had been a Penthouse Pet and made several soft-core Scandinavian films. Surprisingly, she is not the Swedish blonde stereotype but is short like the Japanese actresses, a light brunette, and somewhat baby-faced, while the breasts the camera dotes on in many shots are large by Japanese standards but not up to the traditional “Swedish Blonde” dream girl standard or the huge-breasted missionaries tortured in the first Joy of Torture movie.

You can’t really call it a performance, since she is hampered by having to speak in English and in Japanese, but she gives it a brave try. Curiously, she seems to have more trouble with the English lines than the Japanese ones.

It’s interesting that almost all of the international fan favorites in the pinku violence genre commonly associated with Nikkatsu’s pinku era were actually made at Toei – Female Prisoner Scorpion, Girl Boss, Red Peony, and the two Ocho films – or at Toho – Lady Snowblood, which should be a reminder that what Americans think of as Japanese pink films are not really typical. Ocho is essentially Red Peony in different form, this time with the peony tattooed on her breast rather than her back and far more nudity and simulated sex. Times and expectations have changed enormously for the theatrical film audience in a short six years.

It even has the same director as Red Peony, Norifumi Suzuki. While his Red Peony films were fairly traditional and straight-forward studio work, here he begins to suggest the other Suzuki. The colors are intense (in a DVD of such clarity it could have been issued by Criterion), the settings shift from realism to studio sets to pure theatricality, and Ocho staggers off at the end in a snowstorm of hanafuda cards.

One torture scene takes place under a disco ball, another in a room with a badly painted Christ on the Cross on the wall. The villain is guarded on the train by a troop of switch-blade-carrying Catholic nuns. One man is killed by licking a poisoned perfume from Ocho’s body. Lindberg and her lover die romantically against a totally black background. All of this is topped by Ichiro Araki’s music that sounds so much like Burt Bacharach that you expect Dionne Warwick to launch into the title song during the credits, yet in the final battle suddenly switches to electric blues guitar.

To the Euro/American eye, there are more than a few anachronisms. The British agent is named Guinness but speaks in a broad, obviously American accent, and the European costumes are, as a costume designer friend once commented, a “Parade of the Ages.” Under her kimono, Lindberg wears black seventies panties. One of the standard signals of wealth and/or villainy in the post-war decades was an American car, so the villain suddenly appears in a car for no reason. In a showdown to rescue the young virgin, Ocho suddenly becomes an expert poker player.

Any description makes it all seem pretty silly from this distance, but I don’t want to suggest it is incompetent or takes itself so seriously as to be called “camp.” The absurdities all lie in the screenplay’s attempt to mix Japanese and European elements that don’t quite fit, probably pieced together in a rush to shoehorn Lindberg into an existing script and then out of her clothes as often as possible during her very brief visit to Japan.¹ The imagination and variety of its presentation marks it as far better than similar American or European breasts-and-blood movies made at around the same time, and closer to Japanese visual excesses like Killers on Parade or Gate of Flesh or even Buraikan. It is at one and the same time utterly silly and utterly entertaining.

* It is interesting that the Weissers do not include it in their “complete’ encyclopedia of Japanese Sex Films, and Jasper Sharp’s Behind the Pink Curtain only mentions it in passing in a brief discussion of European actresses who appeared in Japanese pink films.

¹ According to Jasper Sharp, Lindberg was in Japan for only 10 weeks, during which she made two movies. (Behind the Pink Curtain, p. 183.)