A prison van on a mountain road somewhere in the Kansai hinterlands, fully loaded with stylishly dressed and coiffed girls on the way to the youth detention center. The girls sing a defiant song in unison, only one doesn’t join in. Kanto Komasa is her name, we soon learn, played by Miki Sugimoto.
Challenged on her refusal to sing along by Ryoko (Ryoko Ema), the leader of Osaka’s Kurokiku (Black Chrysanthemum) gang, Komasa and Ryoko soon get into a violent altercation. Maya (Reiko Ike), the leader of Osaka’s Gakuran (School Uniform) gang manages to calm them down.
A truck surpasses the prison van on a lonely stretch of the road, then stops the prison bus with a surprising stunt. Ryoko immediately escapes by jumping into the truck – driven by one of her gang members.
In the ensuing confusion, all other girls also make their way into the woods and on to Osaka.
Komasa is joined on the way by three other girls not affiliated with any of the Osaka gangs. Reluctantly, she takes them on, swearing them in on forming their own gang – the Gypsies.
The world of girl gang Osaka is ruled by two gangs, we soon learn. The Gakuran and the Kurokiku, their respective leaders Maya and Ryoko having already been introduced on the prison bus.
The Gakuran dress in school girl uniforms and are thus quite inconspicuous on the streets of the city; the Kurokiku on the other hand are in the service of the Hokuryo-kai, a serious yakuza outlet. The Hokuryu-kai operate a large Turkish Bath – style brothel (today, that would be a Soapland Parlor) in a nearby seaside resort. The Kurokiku snatch young girls and press them into prostitution work at the brothel.
There we have it… two well established female gangs in an uneasy truce, one of them being closely associated with one of the vilest yakuza groups in town.
Komasa tries to establish her small Gypsy gang as another force. Their first attempt at scamming a restaurant leads them into direct contact with the Hokuryu-kai and earns them a serious beating.
They try their luck with rather hilarious enterprises like a yakitori street stall where rather than chicken, they serve the meat of street pigeons they catch.
Once one of the Gypsy gang girls is caught stealing money from a member of the Gakuran School Girl Uniform gang (thinking she would steal from an innocent school girl), the Gypsy gang is in real trouble.
There is no point in spoiling here the details of the many vicious cat fights ensuing between the Gypsies and the Gakuran and soon after also the Kurokiku.
It gets really rough once the Hokuryu-kai get involved and Komasa (Miki Sugimoto) undergoes serious torture by the yakuza. In the nude, of course.
There is also a subplot involving a pornographer named Ichiro (Ichiro Araki) who tries to get Komasa involved in his productions.
In quite funny scenes, Ichiro extorts money from an accountant in the service of the Hokuryu-kai by shooting a porn film starring the wife of said accountant – then screening the film to him.
The money obtained that way is supposed to free Tatsuo (Hiroshi Miyauchi), another Hokuryo-kai affiliate from his debts owed to the Hokuryo-kai. Maya, leader of Gakuran and Tatsuo’s ex-girlfriend, had stabbed and seriously injured the leader of the Hokuryu-kai in a violent rage. Now, Tatsuo had to pay up.
That Tatsuo gets erotically involved with Komasa, an act witnessed by Maya by coincidence, doesn’t help to ease the frictions between the characters.
When the Kurokiku kidnap some of the Gypsy girls and take them, along with other women, to the Turkish Bath, Komasa and Maya finally overcome their animosities and plot the destruction of the Hokuryu-kai…
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Girl Boss: Revenge (Japan, 1973) 女番長
Girl Boss: Revenge, Sukeban being the original title, is a fine example of the violent girl gang movies popular in the early to mid-1970s in Japan.
The 1960s saw a sharp increase in juvenile delinquency in Japan. Many criminal youth gangs formed, some of them being independent, some associated with yakuza networks. Those youth gangs were called bancho and they were almost exclusively male.
In a reaction to not being able to join the bancho gangs, female delinquents formed their own gangs, those were called sukeban. The term sukeban can both mean the leader of such a gang as well as the gang itself, it is also an expression the describe the particular lifestyle of the gang members.
Sukeban were rebellious, dressed sharply and dyed their hair, the gangs were mostly out for shoplifting but as times progressed, violence and bolder criminality became ever more common.
The film studios were quick to pick up on those developments. In 1970, Nikkatsu started its Stray Cat Rock movie series, featuring Meiko Kaji as the super-cool girl gang leader.
Toei answered in 1971 with the inception of its Girl Boss series. Directed by Norifumi Suzuki, Toei’s first sukeban film Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counterattack, featured two upcoming stars in the genre: Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike.
While Meiko Kaji had an incredible charisma which eventually led to international stardom when she played the lead in Lady Snowblood (1973), Toei banked on Miki Sugimoto. Sugimoto would easily shed her clothes (Meiko Kaji never did), Sugimoto would agree to even the most outrageous torture scenes. She played the indestructible yet quite feminine hero.
The first four films of Toei’s Girl Boss series were all directed by Norifumi Suzuki and they all starred Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike.
Girl Boss: Revenge, the film under discussion here, was Suzuki’s last entry into the series. The series continued after his departure for another three films shot by other directors.
Unlike some of its more extreme precursors, Girl Boss: Revenge feels for the most part street-level gritty and realistic. Osaka provides the perfect setting for that approach. Some scenes are quite hilarious but violence dominates the life of the female gangs. There is fight after fight, there is plenty of nudity but the sex scenes are reduced to a minimum.
It’s a Toei Pinky Violence film, focusing on the action not on romantic encounters.
Actresses Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike
Kanto Komasa, the central character of Bad Girl: Revenge is played by Miki Sugimoto while Maya, the leader of rival Gakuran (School Uniform Gang) is played by Reiko Ike.
The careers of the two actresses were inseparable during their time on the big screen in the 1970s.
Reiko Ike, born in 1953, started out in Toei’s Hot Spring Mimizu Geisha in 1971 and she was immediately given the part of lead actress. Toei considered her to be their potential porn star right away. Ike liked to project herself as the “bad girl”, critics later compared her acting intensity to Tura Satana of Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! fame, the iconic 1965 Russ Meyer girl gang roughie.
Miki Sugimoto, also born in 1953 also made her movie debut in Hot Spring Mimizu Geisha – as supporting actress alongside Reiko Ike.
The two of them were from then on regularly cast together in pink and pinky violence films, most famously in the Girl Boss series, starting in 1971 with Girl Boss Blues: Queen Bee’s Counterattack.
Ike and Sugimoto were usually cast in rivaling roles, as leaders of competing gangs. Though, as in Girl Boss: Revenge, they might end up as friends by the end of the respective films.
In those movies, Sugimoto took on scenes featuring extreme torture that even Ike would refuse. Still, Sugimoto was always the second on the bill, Ike being the undisputed star.
The turning point came in 1972 when Ike began to focus on her career as singer, severely cutting down her movie work.
Suddenly, Toei needed a new star to replace Ike. Fearless yet charming Miki Sugimoto was assigned that role.
A role she quickly solidified in a number of different genres. She could play the dutiful housewife in a TV drama just well as an Edo-era princess as a tough girl gang boss or police operative. Never being afraid to show all the parts of her body Japanese censorship would permit.
Ike’s singing career didn’t lead to much more than one record. She entered the movie business again, working with Toei as before but by then, Sugimoto was the dominant face of Toei.
In Girl Boss: Revenge, Sugimoto is clearly the star, Ike is relegated to the role of one of her opponents, receiving much less screen time than Sugimoto.
With Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (1974) Sugimoto finally had her breakthrough as solo actress without Ike being present in the movie at all.
A particularly notable movie starring Sugimoto in her later career was Violent Crash: The Big Panic (1976), an Osaka crime movie directed by Kinji Fukasaku.
In 1978, Sugimoto married, ending her movie career by reportedly becoming a nursery teacher.
Ike on the other hand kept up her rough image to the end. She eventually dropped out of the movie industry in style in the final days of the 1970s – after a drug arrest and another arrest for illegal gambling.
The Director: Norifumi Suzuki
The director of the first four films in the Girl Boss series, Norifumi Suzuki (1933 – 2014) spent almost his entire career at Toei. He started out there as an assistant director, then made his directorial debut with the Osaka movie Osaka Bad Temper Story: Manservant (1965).
Once Toei started to produce Pink Films at the beginning of the 1970s, Suzuki jumped right into the new genre, soon becoming one of Toei’s most productive directors in the field.
Suzuki shot a large number of both Pink and Pinky Violence films for the studio. His greatest success however was the wild trucker series Truck Yaro (10 films, released between 1975 and 1979), starring Bunta Sugawara.
The Truck Yaro films were romantic action comedies, featuring big stars. It’s the Truck Yaro films Suzuki is today most remembered for.
Having grand success with action comedies didn’t stop Suzuki from directing his most notorious film, the truly disturbing Star of David: Beautiful Girl Hunter for rival studio Nikkatsu in 1979, the same year in which he directed the last of the Truck Yaro films.
In 1984, Suzuki eventually left Toei for good and became a freelance director, working in different genres. He shot his final film, Binbara High School in 1991.
Umeda Cinema, Osaka
Girl Boss: Revenge is an Osaka movie all the way through yet Osaka landmarks are hardly in sight. There are street corners that look like Dotonbori, there is a girl gang confrontation starting on a large pedestrian bridge which might be the bridge between Osaka Station and the Hanshin Department Store in Umeda. It’s hard to tell, the camera focuses on the action not the environs.
A great number of Osaka backstreets are on display, though, serving as a perfect backdrop for the many fights unfolding.
One iconic landmark however gets quite a bit of screen time and sweeping camera shots: Koshien Stadium, the home of the Hanshin Tigers, Osaka’s fabled baseball team.
Koshien Stadium is in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, about half-way between Osaka and Kobe. Still, everyone in Osaka would claim the stadium as their own. The Hanshin Tigers are the Osaka team after all, celebrated by the whole city when they win, deeply mourned when they lose.
