| Delinquent Girl Boss – Blossoming Night Dreams (1970) |
|---|
| Director: | Kazuhiko Yamaguchi |
| Writers: | Norio Miyashita and Kazuhiko Yamaguchi |
| Starring: | Reiko Oshida, Junko Miyazono and Yukie Kagawa |
 |
The Plot: Rika (Reiko Oshida) is a juvenile delinquent recently released from the reformatory. She at first finds work at a cleaning business, but soon enough the bossman ends up putting the moves on this young woman and her jealous wife demands Rika leave. So the young woman packs up her things and heads out on the streets of Shinjuku where she runs into a local pimp, who is really more a geek than anything, as well an all-girl gang who she quickly has to trounce. The bottle nose geek just so happens to work as the manager for a local bar, and he takes Rika in where she meets up with a set of familiar faces. The owner of the club is a sweet older woman who at one time was a juvenile delinquent herself, so she has become a matriarch figure for many of the girls from Rika’s old juvenile home. The yakuza however aren’t so interested in these good deeds and are instead interested in the land that the hostess-club happens to sit upon. These goons are currently trying to muscle in on the owner of this bar as they want to bulldoze the property. Since the owner inherited this particular building, it means a lot more to her than just a pocketful of money. This doesn’t go well with the Yakuza and soon enough the girls are forced into a conflict with these criminals. |
| The Review |
|---|
Blossoming Night Dreams, the first of the Delinquent Girl Boss (or Zubekô banchô) series, doesn’t prove to be any more groundbreaking than the previously reviewed Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess, but it does show the blueprint that was honed here and later copied for many other films within the genre. This series of four films, directed by Kazuhiko Yamaguchi and starring Reiko Oshida in varying roles with the name Rika, made the young woman a star and although I find it hard to argue that these movies are all that exemplary on their own; they do paint a vivid picture of both the Pinky Violence genre as well as the rebellious spirit of Japanese cinema during the seventies.
While these movies were certainly about empowering women to a degree, we know that these movies were certainly marketed towards a male demographic as well. When you watch two back-to-back shots that show women lifting their legs and kicking at the camera so that their panties are fully displayed in frame, you know that this is a movie that respects the appetite of its core audience. As with the majority of the film, it doesn’t attempt to break from the mold of Pinky Violence titles. We have plenty of nude women, some rape, shirts ripped open and of course the always epic cat-fight showdown which is treated with a rather grandiose set-up that goes slightly unfulfilled. Yamaguchi attempts to give this cat fight a Sergio Leone vibe, but when the girls start pulling each other’s hair and slapping each other, it tends to take away from that epic build-up.
| The Conclusion |
|---|
