A.k.a. Bestien der Samurei, Die Nackten und die Bestien, The Naked Seven, The Sengoku Rock: Female Warriors, and many more titles. The German
DVD we watched was entitled Bestien der Samurai,
but at one point or another it was released in the land of sausage and beer as Die Satansweiber aus Fernost("She-Devils of the Far East"),
a title notable only for the attempt to link the Japanese flick by title to
Russ Meyer's classic roughie, Faster,
Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (1966 / trailer,
starring Haji
and Tura
Satana), which in Germany was given the title Die Satansweiber von Tittenfield ("She-Devils from Titsfield").
There is little that the two films have in common; indeed, if director Yasuharu
Hasebe's film calls any American exploiters to mind when watched, it would
probably be HG
Lewis's She Devils on Wheels (1968
/ trailer) or, closer
to the horse bone, Al Adamson's The Female
Bunch (1969 / trailer)
— although, when it comes to sheer boobage, as in the amount of naked breast
(and to a lesser extent, naked flesh in general) seen over the course of this
Japanese soft-core costume sex film, neither Meyer's film nor Lewis's nor
Adamson's can hold a candle in comparison. Sengoku
rokku: hayate no onna-tachi is a literal breast celebration: a movie whose
limited non-plot (in the cut we watched) is nothing more than excuse to show
pert, shapely, Asian B and C cups with hard nipples.
German trailer to Die
Nackten und die Bestien:
According to
online sources, the original version of the movie is 120 minutes long; the cut
we saw was a mere 75 mins, which means a lot was cut. (Some
cut scenes.) As far as we can tell, the whole plot aspect mentioned
elsewhere about how our group of seven women coming to the assistance of a
village* got jettisoned, for the
film we watched began with the seven gals watching and then goading the last
two survivors of a battle, each from the opposing side, to battle to the death.
And while our DVD claims they want to enter the bordello business and thus must
cross swords with a samurai out to stop them, in the film itself they enter a
bordello to have fun and because their leader, Eno (Mari
Tanaka), is in love with the self-obsessed guy who runs it, Taro Tenma (Kenji
Kaji), a dude with a hilarious haircut and enough testosterone to share. Out of love, she gets her gals to steal a shipment of
guns, which results in the local overlord setting out to raping and killing the
often naked seven; those his men fail to kill end up on the wrong side of Taro and
his men when, hearing that Taro has decided to NOT start a revolt but to sell
the guns back to the local overlord instead, they steal the guns back again.
*An obvious and intended
take off of the plot of The Seven Samurai
(1954 / trailer),
hence the title The Naked Seven. The Seven Samurai, of course and as you
well should know, got remade in the US as the classic oater, The Magnificent Seven (1960 / trailer).
Needless to say,
this film displays a bent that in no way corresponds to the #MeToo or
#NoMeansNo attitudes of today – but then, it is a Japanese "pink film". Women say
no, get fucked anyways, and because the men are such studs, the women moan and
groan in pleasure even as they grimace in pain or distaste or hate. The movie
might present itself as a flick about ass-kicking babes who take no shit, and
indeed on occasion the gals are that, but above all it is a notably misogynistic
flick about gals who get naked a lot and have a lot of sex and do a lot of
stupid stuff and get abused by men and really aren't half as ass-kicking as they
should be. Of the seven, only three – or was it four? who cares? – ride off
into the sunset alive and with their clothes on.
Our screening of
the flick was with a mixed-gender group, which was probably a mistake as there
are a variety of scenes and attitudes that make it uncomfortable to watch is a
situation in which locker room talk is not an option. But it is doubtful that
locker room talk would have really made the movie all that much better; it is,
in the end, one of those kind of flicks that has you go WTF or laugh a lot, but
also makes you feel a little bit dirty. Not because of the sex, but because the
narrative and events have an in-explicitly and oddly anti-woman feel that no amount of bad dubbing,
laughable death scenes, bad fight scenes, hilarious blood effects and inane
plot developments can sugarcoat.
For us, one of
the most memorable moments – aside from the scene in which one of the women,
Nene (Yuri Yamashina), is raped front & back at the same time to get her to
talk ("Talk you cock-sucking whore!") – is the weird crosscut between
five others having debauched fun as one performs some sort of very traditional dance
and song with a nun, resulting an extremely juxtaposition of low and high
culture. Also, we must say the groovy easy-listening aspects of soundtrack, much
of which sounds as if it were lifted from a vintage Jess Franco film, is
absolutely fabulous.
Is the cut
version of Sengoku rokku: hayate no
onna-tachi good? No. Is it interesting? Yes. But it helps to have a high threshold
for misogyny, and to view the movie not as a serious film or artistic
statement, but as a violent, breast-centric parody of samurai films. One can
only wonder what the full 120-minute version is like…
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