Wild Japan Day 2 - Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter

In the seventies struggling Japanese studios attempted to lure audiences back to cinemas by concentrating their production on sexploitation films, resulting in Nikkatsu’s so-called Roman Porno cycle and Toei’s Pinku films, which became perfect vehicles for formal experiments for many ambitious young directors, among them Yasuharu Hasebe whose name is synonymous with the sexploitation genre after debuting with The Black Tight Killers in 1966. One new genre that emerged as a result was the girl gang film in which Meiko Kaji rose to stardom. In Sex Hunter, the third instalment of the Stray Cat Rock series, she plays Mako, leader of the Alleycats, who spend their time drinking in go-go dancing clubs, engaging in knife fights and generally stalking the streets looking cool. But when their male counterparts The Eagles, led by the enigmatic Baron, begin to ethnically cleanse Tokyo of its ‘halfbreed’ population (more often than not a product of the union between American GIs and Japanese women), the girls, many of whom have mixed-race lovers, decide to rebel. The last straw occurs when Baron pimps them en masse to a sleazy organiser of sex parties (frequented by Americans). Baron removes Mako from the fray, claiming her as his woman although he cannot bring himself to touch her out of impotence, but when he reveals to her that her friends ‘are being gangbanged as we speak’, she immediately returns to the party armed with a stash of coca-cola Molotov cocktails, which she precedes to lob into the room in what must be one of the best ever uses of the soft drink brand that is synonymous with American cultural imperialism.

Although the title and plot summary would suggest the kind of film where the best you could hope for was a so-bad-its-good brand of entertainment, Sex Hunter is a surprisingly sophisticated film, both in terms of its high production values (scope, lavish set pieces, fine acting) and its intelligent narrative that seriously tackles pointed social issues. The film is of course incredibly subversive in its depiction of strong female characters taking on the male establishment as well as its treatment of race, which had been a mute topic in Japanese mainstream cinema up to that point.

Mako’s love interest is also a mixed-race stranger, Kazuma, who has wandered into town in search of his lost sister. His entrance, in which the camera shoots his feet before panning up to reveal a man dressed in a flamboyant yellow shirt and lip synching to an old Japanese pop song, is undeniably cool, and, like the westerns from which this film draws its narrative model, the presence of this outsider serves as a catalyst to the tensions between the two opposing camps. Baron’s gang take their quarry to a derelict military base and chase them through the long grass in ex-army surplus jeeps; as they are given a thirty second head start Baron sits nonchalantly flicking through the pages of an illustrated history of hunting. This setting, which evokes the American military presence of the immediate post-war years, becomes the location of the tragic final shoot out in which Baron and Kazuma blast each other to death with rifles.

This is a film that looks and sounds amazing, driven as it is by a brilliantly psychedelic visual design that is often so stylish it hurts, and a supercool Jazz soundtrack, complimented by various appearances from Japanese pop group The Golden Half, who were also of dual origin. It’s available on DVD by the American Cinematheque label.