Tokugawa Onna Keizu (1968)

Tokugawa Onna Keizu

Tokugawa Onna Keizu marks the beginning of Teruo Ishii's turn towards the depraved Japanese genre known as pinky violence or bad girl action films, a genre he is recognized as having created.  This film has lots of the pinky but hardly any violence.  His next film Tokugawa Onna Keibatsu-shi, also known as The Joy of Torture, is really where graphic violence is married to gratuitous nudity and the pinky violence genre becomes established.

The shogun is a bit of a pervert.  He wants to find a woman who will love him for who he is and not because he's the shogun but he has trouble finding one.  After witnessing a mole on the inner left thigh of one of the girls in his harem, he becomes obsessed with having her.  The other girls become jealous and threatened by the shogun's affections towards this birthmarked girl because she could produce a male heir and therefore become his favorite.  They hold her down and burn the mole off.  He loses interest in the whole mole thing.

Next, after watching a topless sumo competition amongst the harem girls he becomes enamored with the small but adorable winner played by Yukie Kagawa.  She teaches him some bedroom judo but, after talking in her sleep, the shogun learns she once slept with a monk and he becomes enraged.  She kills herself by biting off her tongue.

"I pooted."

A noble woman staying at his residence is spotted peeing in the bushes and he falls for her.  Eventually she gets pregnant but the shogun isn't sure if the child is his or was fathered by one of his daimyo.  He doesn't know whether to discard her like the other lovers or accept the unborn child and mother into his family.  After forcing himself on several other women, he does some soul searching and realizes that he has been kind of a dick.

Because this is a Teruo Ishii film, it isn't just about the shogun getting it on with his harem girls.  It has depth and makes you reflect on the human condition, about what is important in life, about personal duty and honor.  Tokugawa Onna Keizu can be slow at times and is definitely lacking in violence but it's a beautiful movie and I recommend seeing it.  It will make you think about stuff, and stuff.

Violence Rating:  1 out of 5
Booby Rating:  4.5 out of 5

Here is the shogun wrestling with his demons:

Horrors of Malformed Men

Also Known As

• Horror of a Deformed Man
• Horror of the Malformed Men
• Edogawa Rampo taizen: Kyofu kikei ningen

Main Details

• Released in 1969
• Color
• 99 min
• 2.35:1
• Production Co: Toei Studios

Cast and Crew

• Directed by Teruo Ishii

• Written by Masahiro Kakefuda and Teruo Ishii

• Music by Masao Yagi

• Cinematography by Shigeru Akatsuka

• Starring: Teruo Yoshida, Asao Koike, Yukie Kagawa, Yumiko Katayama, Tatsumi Hijikata 

 For this review I thought I'd go back to Japan for some more pinky violence, although this is a strange departure from the typical yakuza/samurai/motorcycle gang pinky violence film.  This is one of those movies where, after it was over, I was left sitting there wondering what the hell I just watched.  It starts out normal enough but then takes a detour into crazy Japanese grindhouse territory.   

Horrors of Malformed Men has basically two parts.  The first half revolves around an amnesiac trying to figure out his past and the second half is a batshit crazy "Island of Dr. Moreau" parallel.  Our hero, Hirosuke, finds himself in an insane asylum but has no idea about his identity other than the fact that he's a medical student with vague memories of an unknown island.  He escapes and with only those sparse clues and a song from his childhood stuck in his head, he sets out to discover his past.

Soon after, Hirosuke hears the childhood song being sung by a young girl traveling through the area with a circus.  He questions her and learns that the song is from one of the Japanese coastal towns but she is killed before she can reveal more.  Of course, Hirosuke is accused of the crime as he pulls the knife from her body in the middle of a crowd in a scene reminiscent of Hitchcock's North by Northwest.

In disguise he travels to the coastal town and soon discovers that a man from a wealthy and influential family has just died in this community, and that this dead man looked exactly like Hirosuke.  He has the brilliant idea to dig up the corpse, dress in the dead man's funeral garb and convince people that he was buried alive and hence take on the dead man's identity.  Acting as his dead doppleganger, Hirosuke learns of an insane man on a nearby island who may hold the key to his identity.  What he discovers there blows his mind!  I don't want to reveal too much but it involves incest, bestiality,torture and such.

I give Horrors of Malformed Men a thumbs up.  It held my interest simply as a mystery story and all the added crazy Japanese elements were just bonuses.  The ending will leave you scratching your head or perhaps laughing at the insanity of it all, but I'm sure you will be entertained either way.

Violence Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Booby Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Get Horrors of Malformed Men 
Unrated at TLACult.com

See all of Yukie's nude scenes at MrSkin.com!

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Bohachi: Clan of the Forgotten Eight

Also Known As
Porno Jidaigeki: Bohachi Bushido
Bohachi Bushido: Code of the Forgotten Eight

Main Details
Released in 1973
Color
2.35:1
Production Co: Toei

Cast and Crew
Directed by Teruo Ishii
Cinematography by Jubei Suzuki
Music by Hajime Kaburagi
Written by San Kaji, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima
Starring: Tetsuro Tanba, Goro Ibuki, Tatsuo Endo and Ryohei Uchida

Instead of a pure Pinky Violence feature, this time I thought I’d review Bohachi: Clan of the Forgotten Eight which is sort of a Chambara/Pinky Violence hybrid.  For those who are unaware, Chambara films are basically those of the sword fighting samurai genre.  In the grindhouse world that includes such films as the Zatoichi and Lone Wolf and Cub Series.  In fact, Kazuo Koike wrote the two manga for which Lone Wolf and Cub and Bohachi: Clan of the Forgotten Eight were based.  Now on to the blood and boobies...

Tetsuro Tanba as "Shino, the Assassin"

The story begins with our hero Shino (played by Tanba Tetsuro) embroiled in a bloody sword fight... on a bridge... at sunset... against overwhelming odds.  After cutting down wave after wave of advancing government troops who want him captured or dead, merely because he kills people for a living, he grows weary of killing says screw it and steps of the bridge into the icy waters below.  He’s ronin so he didn’t actually say, “Screw it.”  It was a much more poetic, "To live is hell, but to die, also is hell."

 He is fished out and revived by warmth of a few of the whores of the Bohachi clan.  The Bohachi are bad guys.  They reject the eight values of honor, piety and selflessness of Confucianism and by doing so, live only for personal pleasure and gain thus making them "beasts in human skin."  They are essentially samurai with an anti-bushido ethos.  Shino is tested to become a member of this ruthless gang (it involves money and sex) andultimately fails but is still welcomed into the clan by it's leader because, you know, he's invincible.  The Bohachi chief has lofty goals and needs some help to carry out his plans of eliminating rival prostitution gangs.

 Shino says, "Sure" because he has nothing else to do and commences killing or publicly shaming the guys who get it on with whores from rival gangs.  He then takes on the rival gangs themselves and everything goes swimmingly until Shino is double-crossed by the Bohachi chief and is forced to take out his employer, the Bohachi clan and then finally confront the government troops in an epic final fight on a snow covered battlefield.

Bohachi: Clan of the Forgotten Eight  is a blood soaked Japanese period piece with boobies galore, as one would expect from this mixed genre, but it contains elements which set it apart from other Pinky Violence/Chambara films:

- Naked knife-wielding women bodyguards

- A syphilitic sex-addict prostitute kept in a cage

- Opium induced hallucinations

- Flying severed limbs and heads

Booby rating:  4.5 out of 5

Violence rating:  4 out of 5

Get Bohachi Bushido: Code Of The Forgotten Eight 
Unrated at TLACult.com