After a politician’s daughter is kidnapped by a ruthless gang, a brutal policewoman is released from jail and sent after them.
Zeroka no onna: Akai wappa
Der Tiger von Osaka – West Germany
Yukio Noda
Miki Sugimoto, Eiji Gô, Tetsurô Tanba, Hideo Murota, Yôko Mihara
Japan
From IMDb:
One of the biggest accomplishment in Japanese exploitation cinema
When you discover Japanese exploitation cinema, it can give you headaches, cause there’s so much of it, and people who love it tend to consider every piece of crap as a masterpiece, so its’ really confusing. Its’ hard to go into it. Nobody wrote a complete history of Japanese exploitation masterpieces, most of them are simple lists of hundreds of movies. Surely Female Scorpion 1, Stray Cat Rock 3, Criminal Woman and every Seijun Suzuki movies are at the center core of it, but i’m no specialist. And Red Hancuffs was perhaps the one that really convinced me even more than the others. Cause of its pure graphics (red upon green upon black upon red), and cause of its pure violence, which is less gratuitous than in other, ore included in the narration, more believable, and less grotesque than in Norifumi Suzuki’s movies. Editing is as experimental as in other Japanese movies of the time : sometimes the sound disappears, sometimes it comes back, you got zooms and jump cuts and rotating cameras, but in the same time, you got also a true story that, despite its chaotic aspect, is quite good and nihilistic. Part of the anti-American thing is a little bit boring, but the movie is so graphic, so full of energy, so original, so beautiful and the music so brilliant that we have to consider this as a masterpiece. And Miki Sugimoto, who’s playing a very blasé and cold femme fatale, is playing here what might be her best role.
