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The Delinquent Girl Boss movies are just my speed, because as much as I hate to admit it, I’m a bit of a Pinky Violence lightweight. It’s not that I don’t like the genre. I do, very much. It’s just that it’s one that’s so fraught with potential pitfalls that watching an unfamiliar entry can be a bit of a risky proposition. In my experience, the most successful PV films maintain an almost painfully delicate balance between sleaze and artistry, and those that don’t leave me with nothing more than a ninety minute hole in my life and a feeling of being mildly pervy.

It’s for this reason that, for all the depravity on display, I can still get a kick out of Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom, while Girl Boss Guerrilla, from the same director, makes me want to tear my brain out and scrub it with a Brillo pad–or that, while I consider Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable, with all its incest and bloody backroom abortions, to be a small masterpiece, Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs just reminds me that I should probably wash my hands after handling the discs I get from Netflix.

The Delinquent Girl Boss movies, on the other hand, could best be described as Pinky Violence “lite”. That is due in great part to their star, Reiko Oshida, who is simply so adorable that you’d never want any of those things that happen to Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike in their movies to happen to her. (Not that you necessarily want them to happen to Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike, either–but obviously someone does, because it seems like neither of them can get through a movie without having some sweaty yakuza or lesbian prison guard string them up and whip them across the chest.) Though Rika, the character that the baby-faced Oshida portrays, is certainly a tough customer, she’s less worldly and careworn than her sister delinquents, and you get the clear impression that her bravado is to some extent meant to cover up for some residual adolescent doofyness. In contrast to the hardened teenage killing machines typically played by Sugimoto or Ike, with Rika there is a faint glimmer of hope of a brighter future lying ahead, and that not only keeps you rooting for the character, but also allows the series as a whole to take on a somewhat lighter tone than other films in the genre. Not that it’s all picnics and popsicles, mind you.

Blossoming Night Dreams is the first in the Delinquent Girl Boss series, as well as Toei’s first entry in the Pinky Violence genre. Spurred to jump into the game by the success of Nikkatsu’s Stray Cat Rock series of female delinquent films, the studio would go on to make the PV genre their own through more brazenly exploitative franchises like the aforementioned Terrifying Girls’ High School and Female Prisoner Scorpion films. At the time of this film, the template that those later films followed had yet to be set, and so, while there is a fair share of tits and blood on display, there’s nowhere near as much as would become standard within a couple years. Furthermore–and again unlike perennial PV stars Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike–Oshida was not required to shed her clothing for her role, leaving the burden of baring all upon her supporting stars.

As with Worthless to Confess, the final entry in the Delinquent Girl Boss series (and the only other one that I’ve seen) Blossoming Night Dreams opens in a girls’ reform school, giving us a scene in which the rowdy inmates make a mockery of a presentation on bridal etiquette, using it as an opportunity for what you have to guess is just the latest in a series of regularly occurring wild brawls. This presentation, in which a prim charm school matron delivers such dispiriting bromides as “to look like a bride is life itself”, paints a pretty cynical picture of the possibilities that await these girls on the outside, and it’s not hard to side with them when they run riot over the thing. Still, these possibilities have to be confronted, and we soon shift forward a year, where we find nineteen year-old Rika back on the outside, trying to put her past behind her and play it straight and narrow. Unfortunately, as countless films have taught us, that’s rarely an easy thing to do.

Rika first finds work at a laundry, but loses that job when the owner attempts to rape her, and his wife, stumbling in on the two of them, assumes that it is Rika who is trying to seduce him. The next horny male Rika encounters, however, ends up being a little more helpful, as Tsunao (series regular Tonpei Hidari) is able to provide her with an introduction to Umeko, a former inmate of the same reform school who runs a bar and nightclub where a number of the schools’ alumni work as hostesses. It seems like Rika may have found a safe haven under the wing of the maternal Umeko, but the old ways start to exert their pull again once she discovers that a local Yakuza clan is trying to muscle Umeko out of her ownership of the club. Just when you think you’re out…

As is typical with Pinky Violence movies, pretty much all of the men that the girls in Blossoming Night Dreams encounter are goonish, sex obsessed louts. In the case of the more sympathetic ones, you get the sense that only a thin layer of civility (or, in some cases, just timidity) prevents them from simply taking by force what they want from these women. This conceit makes watching Pinky Violence movies in general a complicated proposition for a male; While you’re invited to ogle at the exposed female flesh on display, these films pretty much tell you that, in doing so, you’re no different from the leering and slobbering potential rapists that inhabit them. Aside from the odd reformed yakuza, the only nobility you’ll see is that displayed by the women, who know that they only have their own community to protect them within a world dominated by ruthless male predators (something that’s driven home, as it is here, by the mournful enka ballad that opens so many of the films in the genre–which is usually a tragic rumination on a woman’s narrow options in a heartless male world). Because of this, the scenes of stoically endured torture and abuse that you see in some of the harder-edged entries in the genre are as much tableaus of martyrdom as they are mere kinky spectacle. Finally, placing a further obstacle in the way of enjoying these films as pure titillation is the fact that what consensual sex occurs is almost always joyless for these women, with sex presented as just another cynical means of survival.

Now, by this I’m not saying that these films are necessarily feminist in their perspective–though they do seem, despite being written and directed by men, somewhat anti-male (which–sorry guys–is not the same thing). I’m just trying to point out that the viewpoint they present is certainly one that’s more complex than one might assume. And that complexity provides a framework for, among other things, some well drawn and sympathetic female characters–though not so much the male ones. Don’t get me wrong, of course: while Blossoming Night Dreams is pretty tame, a lot of the other films in the genre could fairly be called “dirty movies”. But to dismiss them as being only that would be a mistake, and would perhaps deny you a challenging and rewarding movie watching experience… with boobs.

Anyway, because suffering is such an important part of these movies–and Reiko Oshida seems to be off limits in terms of baring the full brunt of it–it’s a good thing that we have on hand Yuki Kagawa’s character Mari. Judging from this and Worthless to Confess, Mari serves as the Delinquent Girl Boss saga’s emotional pin cushion. Here Mari is working as one of the bar hostesses, and a major subplot involves her desperate search for her drug addicted younger sister, Bunny, who is on the run after having stolen a stash of drugs from the Yakuza (those same yakuza who are trying to take over the nightclub, naturally). After failing to reach Bunny before the gang can, with predictably tragic results, Mari goes out seeking revenge, only to end up being viciously gang raped. Kagawa gives one of a number of solid performances in the film, investing Mari with a haunted soulfulness that makes her plight all the more painful to witness. Because of that I wish I could say that things improve for Mari as the series progresses, but I’m afraid no one saw fit to give the poor girl a break, as the final film ends with her stricken with a case of TB contracted from her no good yakuza boyfriend.

The above is not to say that Rika is wholly exempt from being at the receiving end of some hard treatment and harsh lessons. There’s a somewhat surprising episode in which she naively offers herself to the yakuza boss Ohba in return for him waiving a debt he’s been holding over Umeko’s head. Of course, Ohba avails himself of what’s offered (though, unlike with Mari, we’re only shown the aftermath) but with no intention of keeping up his end, and he allows the rest of the gang to rough Rika up before kicking her to the curb. Though there is a brief scene in which Umeko admonishes a shame-faced Rika for her stupidity, the film gives only cursory attention to the effect that this presumably traumatic event has had on Rika, and mostly just uses it to provide fuel for the bloody payback that we know is coming. It’s not the only time that the series is a little dishonest in how it isolates its star from the worst of what it has to dish out, but for me it was the instance in which that practice was the most distracting.

Once every other avenue of recourse has been exhausted, and the accumulated insults and injuries have become to great, the women of the Bar Murasaki determine that screaming, blade slashing, blood spraying vengeance is the only answer. It’s at this point that those of us who have already seen Worthless to Confess (which is most of us who would watch Blossoming Night Dreams, given that Worthless beat the first film to DVD by a couple of years) realize that Blossoming Night Dreams has followed pretty much the exact trajectory as that later film: We have the opening in prison, followed by various attempts to go straight in the outside world, which are foiled in turn by the greedy machinations of the Yakuza, and, finally, a number of intertwining subplots that coalesce into a hyper-violent girl-on-gangster finale. This, however, doesn’t make the sweet, sweet payback any less satisfying, and it’s to Blossoming Night Dream‘s credit that its predictability doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.

While it lacks those unexpected moments of transcendent lyricism that mark Norifumi Suzuki’s better PV films–and that can be found throughout the first three Female Prisoner Scorpion movies–Blossoming Night Dreams is not without its instances of visual poetry. Still, its overall look is most representative of the type of high level craftsmanship that was standard in the Japanese commercial cinema of its day. Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi would go on to direct all four films in the series, and his work here–along with that of cinematographer Hanjiro Nakazawa–shows a studied attention to composition and color that insures that each shot has an appealingly hyper-real sheen. This serves especially well in the psychedelic nightclub numbers, which are largely indistinguishable from the psychedelic nightclub numbers in many other Japanese movies of the period, and are all the better for it (after all, why mess with a winning formula?).

I really liked Blossoming Night Dreams. As I’ve indicated, it won’t overwhelm you with its artistry, but it is a handsomely made film, and the performances are uniformly top notch. And because I didn’t have to spend half of its running time cringing and hoping that my wife didn’t walk into the room, it afforded me the opportunity to savor some of those aspects of the PV genre that are most appealing to me. I imagine that the other two movies in the cycle that I have yet to see are largely the same, but that doesn’t make me want to see them any less. The fact is, I would watch them for Reiko Oshida alone, even if they consisted entirely of her reading the Tokyo phonebook to a stuffed ocelot. She’s simply one of the most appealing stars of her day, period.

Release Year: 1970 | Country: Japan | Starring: Reiko Oshida, Masumi Tachibana, Yukie Kagawa, Keiko Fuji, Hayato Tani, Toshiaki Minami, Bokuzen Hidari, Yasushi Suzuki, Saburo Bouya, Tatsuo Umemiya, Tonpei Hidari | Director: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi | Writers: Norio Miyashita, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi | Cinematographer: Hanjiro Nakazawa | Music: Toshiaki Tsushima | Producers: Kenji Takamura, Kineo Yoshimine