Stray Cat Rock: Machine Animal

Acid Drops

Stray Cat Rock -
Machine Animal
aka Nora-neko rokku -
Mashin animaru
Japan 1970
Directed by Yasuharu Hasebe
Nikkatsu/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B
As part of Arrow’s Stray Cat Rock Dual Edition Set

Warning: Yep... this one has spoilers.

Well this is more like it. Stray Cat Rock: Machine Animal is Yasuharu Hasebe’s third and final entry into the loose series of Stray Cat Rock movies following the first, Delinquent Girl Boss (reviewed here) and the third, Sex Hunter (reviewed here). This is the fourth in the series and I have to say, he’s really on form here, capturing a lot of the mood and directorial style of his series debut in a way that both Toshiya Fujita’s Wild Jumbo (reviewed here) and his own Sex Hunter failed to do.

The film opens strongly with a low down shot looking up from some train tracks as characters are introduced scattershot by a title sequence which, apart from the title song, also has the dialogue and the actors starting the story straight away, as a girl gang headed up once again by the inimitable Meiko Kaji deal with two rapists and the rapid cuts and completely changing frames of the titles, due to constantly splitting and masking various areas of the screen off. It looks and feels like an explosive, crazy pop art comic strip brought to life and really makes an impression.

We then see the girls giving an aggressive but ultimately non-physical welcome to a couple of drifters whose car has broken down. These characters and their friend are in town to try and get a boat out of Japan... it transpires a little later in the plot... and they have 500 capsules of LSD (I know absolutely nothing about drugs and didn’t even know LSD came in capsules)that they need to sell, to buy passage on a boat out of there. The reason being that their naive young friend Charlie, is basically deserting from the war in Vietnam, so they are all set to grab a new life in Sweden.

Meiko Kaji is playing a different character again, Maya, who is fairly interchangeable with most of her other roles in the series it has to be said. For the second time in the series and, following on from Sex Hunter, she is wearing the trademark black floppy hat pitched against a white outfit. She certainly has a hard boiled delinquent presence about her which is quite hypnotic and is the character the eyes seem to go for when she’s in a shot.

As usual, the film is scattered with scenes in the girl gangs regular night club hangout with the live, wild and trendy pop songs playing to give the youthful atmosphere the Nikkatsu suits probably insisted on but, it has a level of coolness that fits the characters well. Also as usual, most of the ‘alley cats’ or ‘stray cats’ in the movies all seem to be played by the same actresses as previous installments.

As the film progresses and it’s discovered the three guys looking to get out of Japan have drugs, everybody seems to want the drugs... especially Maya’s mob. They manage to successfully steal the three friends’ car and drugs but, when they catch up with them one of them, Nobo (played by Tatsuya Fuji), appeals to their better judgement when he tells them the truth of why they need the money to get out of Japan... and so Maya and her clique decide to help them instead and, because they damaged their car so much, put them up in their secret dockland lair while Maya finds a buyer for the drugs. She also become’s Nobo’s ‘almost lover’ and the film almost becomes a musical when Maya sings a song to signal to the audience her desire for Nobo. And, if you’re wondering... Nobo is short for Nobody. So take that Terence Hill, this character’s name really is Nobody.

Maya’s buyers are the local friendly male group known as the Dragon Gang. However, they double cross her and steal the drugs back for themselves and from then on, it’s various chases, fights and hostage exchanges... including a scene where the likeable Charlie is shot in the leg by the military police and ‘taken away’. The film isn’t over yet though but, like the previous four movies, ends as you would expect... in tragedy... although, similar to the last film, at least two of the people you want to survive manage to come through the film fairly unscathed.

There’s also another late part of the plot which involves the ‘real’ and somewhat nefarious boss of The Dragons being the girl Yuri, played by Bunraku Han from two of the previous films. In this she’s in a wheelchair due to an accident and she lives in a wonderful looking apartment which, in terms of the furniture, drapes and wallpaper... are all purple. Another brilliant stylish decision from the director which enlivens the look and feel of the film.

And like I said earlier, the various ‘in your face’ stylistic flourishes are back in full swing in this one. A striking example is when four of the girls steal Nobo’s car. As they drive off the director crosscuts two shots, one of the back of the car driving off and one of the girls inside. The two shots are rapidly cut together to create a kind of discernible visual strobe and then, when it finally resettles on the back of the car which is speeding off into the distance, away from the camera in the middle of the shot, the next shot enters quite slowly but simultaneously from both sides of the screen in a double wipe, reminiscent of a gatefold sleeve album cover, coming together to give us all of the information. This is then followed up straight away by a series of split screen shots contrasting the three guys on foot, running around and looking for the car with various shots of the speeding car itself. It’s a slick, sophisticated visual language the director is peddling here and, because of the youth and vibrance of the target audience being exploited, he can get away with it too. It fits the attitude of the characters and the situations they get in and it makes for a great cinematic experience, not to mention reminding the audience that film is a major art form.

There’s a curious scene later in the film where the girl gang of anti heroes are chasing the Dragon Gang and the girls all steal Honda bikes out of a Honda showroom following Meiko Kaji’s outcry that... “We need Hondas!” It’s a bizarre and suspiciously unnecessary scene which completely seems like it must be a bit of product placement from the company in question... which seems a bit odd since they are therefore associating their product with a gang of girl delinquents who regularly consume booze and drugs and threaten people with their knives. Also strange is that, for this one chase scene only, so far that I can remember in a Stray Cat Rock film, the girls have all taken time to grab a proper motorcycle helmet and, they certainly look the opposite of ‘cool’ in this scene. One wonders if the helmets were a stipulation of whatever contract that the studio signed with Honda, if that is indeed the case (if you know the answer to this, please let me know in the comments below).

And that’s Stray Cat Rock - Machine Animal done and dusted, other than to say... just like Wild Jumbo and Sex Hunter, I have absolutely no idea what Machine Animal is supposed to be referring to. There are no real machines present (other than the odd motorcycle) and no animals in the mix either... I mean, it kinda sounds cool but, yeah, I’ve got no idea. Answers on a postcard please. Apart from that, though, this is easily the second best of the Stray Cat Rock films I’ve seen, next to the first installment, so this one gets another solid recommendation from me, as does Arrow’s superb Stray Cat Rock dual Blu Ray/DVD boxed edition. And I hope to be watching the fifth and final entry into the series very soon.

Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter

Race Expectations

Stray Cat Rock -
Sex Hunter
aka Nora-neko rokku -
Sekkusu hantaa
Japan 1970
Directed by Yasuharu Hasebe
Nikkatsu/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B
As part of Arrow’s Stray Cat Rock Dual Edition Set

Warning: More damn spoilerage!

Fresh off his truly brilliant first entry into what became the loose series of Stray Cat Rock movies, Delinquent Girl Boss (reviewed here), director Yasuharu Hasebe returns with his third entry in the series, Stray Cat Rock - Sex Hunter. This film once again toplines Meiko Kaji, who was, apparently, simultaneously shooting the second movie in the series, Wild Jumbo (reviewed here). Now, it has to be said that the film certainly isn’t as stylistically aggressive as the first movie and, that’s actually to this films detriment. Hasebe does do some interesting stuff in it, though, which puts the film making on display here head and shoulders against the first follow up and, I’ll talk about a few of those things soon.

This time around, Meiko Kaji plays Mako, the boss of another all-female, delinquent gang and she has a wonderful entrance shot which kicks off the movie and acts as a nice bookend moment to the film. Basically, she has her head down to the camera so all we can see is the top of her hat, before bringing her head up so we get her face in close up and see that she’s wearing one of those big floppy hats (if not the exact same floppy hat) that is almost iconic to her early roles and which she would also wear again for her next big series running character, Female Prisoner Scorpion. She also, in combination with this, wears a big, loose, white shirt, black waistcoat and carries this awkward looking cane around with her for most of the movie (one year before Malcolm McDowell was using a big cane as the head of his gang of droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange).

Right away, we know this particular gang are edgier and dirtier than the pseudo-gang in Wild Jumbo. After relinquishing an alleged pervert of his wallet, Mako gets into a night time duel with one of her girls and we are soon treated to a ‘knives and flashlights’ fight. After this, Mako meets and falls for a drifter called Kazuma, played by Rikiya Yasuoka. In another scene, a local ‘friendly’ male gang called The Eagles, lead by The Baron (played by Tatsuya Fuji) have an orgiastic ‘drug party’ with Mako’s gang. Here, the main crux of the film is explored as one of the Baron’s men is jealous of one of the girls, who is dating a ‘half-breed’ (in their words). They go to beat the guy to within an inch of his life and force him out of town. We then get treated to a bizarre, sepia tinted flashback with blood splashed over the frame, to an incident from when The Baron was a little boy and his sister (or someone close to him) was raped by black soldiers. A switch goes off in The Baron’s brain and his race hate comes to the fore... which is later coupled with his impotence and love of hunting black people and hence, therefore, but I admit it’s a bit of a stretch, we get the title Sex Hunter (well, that’s as good an explanation as I’ve found anyway).

And then we get shenanigans of a much more hard hitting kind as various ‘half breeds’ are beaten up and thrown out of town and The Baron wants the one who has stolen the heart of his gal, the drifter Kazuma who is looking for his long lost sister. His sister is, in fact, one of Mako’s gang but she doesn’t want to acknowledge him because, that reveals her as a notorious ‘half breed’. Indeed, when The Baron’s men do find out, they gang rape her... apart from one of The Baron’s men. In another proof of his underlying psychotic nature, The Baron guns down his right hand man, mostly for not taking part in the raping but also because he reveals his own, problematic (to The Baron), parental heritage.

The whole thing ends in tragedy after Mako rides a stolen motorbike to the rescue and breaks up The Baron’s special ‘rape party’ for the girls with a bunch of Molotov cocktails fashioned from Coke bottles. Yes folks, ‘it’s the real thing’ alright, in the most explosive way. This all leads up to Mako and Kazuma holing up in a little watch tower with a rifle and The Baron’s men surrounding them. When The Baron enters the tower, he and Kazuma fill each other with a gazillion bullets and die... but not before Kazuma also manages to shoot his own sister dead for some strange reason known only to himself. The last shot of the film is of Meiko Kaji, who has astonishingly had a character survive the end of a Stray Cat Rock film for the first time, looking into camera with the disappointment and heartbreak etched into her hardening face, putting on her big floppy hat and then looking down, in an exact reverse of the opening scene.

And it’s quite entertaining... although the racial discrimination elements seem a little less subtle and more disturbing as the world has moved on since 1970. The director doesn’t use as many fast flowing, energetic camera movements or short edits as in Delinquent Girl Boss but he does go in this direction on occasion. For example, the knife fight at the start of the film is put together with long shots of either very smooth camera movements or static shots... however, intercut with these are the close ups of the fight with the camera getting in close with the girls and those shots are used in the more traditional shorthand of chaotic, hand held camera takes.

Something he does do to pull it back to the style of the first film in, presumably, an attempt to hold the interest of the teen market, is to have the psychedelic nightclub, the Go Go Spot... with various bands performing in multiple, cross-cut primary colour palettes... something the girls are always coming back to (I actually have the soundtrack CD for this one and it’s a fun spin, for sure).

Another thing he does is change the shape of the aspect ratio when he wants to. The technique is nowhere near as varied or interesting (it has to be said) as the stuff in his first Stray Cat Rock movie but, on a number of occasions in this one, he will pull a whole sequence into a 4:3 ratio in the middle of a frame to focus the audience attention in on just what he wants them to notice... which also serves to give those highlighted sequences a more intimate feel.

There’s also a moment of nice experimentation a lot more reminiscent of what the director was doing in his previous, more ground breaking movie in the scene when The Baron guns down one of his own men. When he pulls the trigger way more times than he would normally have bullet capacity for in his automatic, the editor goes crazy and we flash to and from The Baron and his victim on different parts of the screen like a rapid firing, 'almost too fast for the eye to follow' art collage. It certainly hammers home the tonal weight the director is trying for with the scene and sets it up as an event which, should you incredibly have any doubts by this point anyway, will leave you in no difficulties understanding who the real villain of the piece here is.

And that’s me done on Stray Cat Rock - Sex Hunter, I think. This was the only one of the Stray Cat Rock pictures which I’ve managed to see at a cinema (when the BFI did a ‘one off’ screening a decade or two ago) and the only one I also already had on DVD. Although it isn’t as impactful as Delinquent Girl Boss, this film is still very entertaining and Meiko Kaji certainly lives up to her rising star... with the iconic look I always think of her in, pretty much complete here. Curiously, although her character actually survives to the end of this film, she’s once again playing a totally different character in the next Stray Cat Rock movie, which is the next thing I’ll review here.

Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo

Wuthering Heist

Stray Cat Rock -
Wild Jumbo
aka Nora-neko rokku -
Wairudo janbo
Japan 1970
Directed by Toshiya Fujita
Nikkatsu/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B
As part of Arrow’s Stray Cat Rock Dual Edition Set

Warning: Full on spoilerage.

First of all... I have to say I have no idea what the phrase Wild Jumbo means. I have tried to find out if it’s anything which has any kind of significance in Japanese and, well, I’ve come back empty handed. However, I will assure you that no elephants were harmed in the making of this movie. In fact, there aren’t even any elephants anywhere in the movie so... yeah... no idea.

Stray Cat Rock - Wild Jumbo is the second of the five, very loosely thematically linked Stray Cat Rock films that Nikkatsu churned out at great speed to have four releases in 1970 and the fifth released in 1971. Indeed, I read that the Alley Cats (or Stray Cats cast) were making the third movie in the series, Sex Hunter, simultaneous to this one and that the Alley Cats were being driven between sets. However, I’m not so sure of the source on that one because, in terms of the two female cast members, this film only has Meiko Kaji in common so... yeah, maybe and maybe not. Don’t know.

The five films all featured rising superstar Kaji but always playing a different character in a different set up. Here, she is still part of a ‘gang’, “The Pelican Club”, but she’s the only female member, C-Ko... sharing the screen with the other members played by Takeo Chii, (Takeo) Tatsuya Fuji (Ganishin), Yûsuke Natsu (Jirô) and Sôichirô Maeno (Debo)... all playing stereotypical characters associated with leadership, strength, stupidity etc. When Takeo, the leader, falls for a ‘girl with a mission’, the playful group get involved in a daring heist to rob a major religious group of 30 million yen for the second half of the movie. The girl with a mission is striking actress Bunjaku Han, playing a character called Asako here.

Now, it has to be said, this film isn’t a patch on the last one. it doesn’t have many of the stylistic flashes and pacing of the previous director’s movie in the run and even the attitude of the main characters, who are all pretty much a lovable bunch, adds to the tone of the film being a little ‘old fashioned’ rather than something which is capturing the edginess of the first movie. Indeed, while the inevitable ‘rival gang’ does indeed inflict some damage to the characters, it’s not as violent and full on as the gang warfare in the other pictures (at least not the ones I’ve seen and nor does it compare to the delinquent girl gang movies I’ve seen put out by other studios).

It does have a few brief moments of stylistic bravado though. For example, the moment in the title sequence, superimposed over a montage of four of the gang having a playful time by a river, has some nice shots cut out of circles of just their feet as they walk past some tubes (presumably that’s what that sequence of shots is supposed to represent). This sequence also features a foreshadowing moment when Ganishin pushes Jirô into a deep drop into water. As Jirô’s body falls, the film does a deliberate stutter, freezing the frame just briefly, twice, before he hits the water and the title card comes up. It means nothing at this point but, right near the end of the movie, when Jirô is shot dead by the police and he takes a tumble off the side of a bridge into water, the director similarly stutters his downward descent with the same technique. Ganishin falls to the floor with a similar stutter too when he’s taken out by a police sniper a little later on.

Other stylistic flourishes such as static shot montages showing American tourists snapping pictures of their holiday and sped up footage of the gang fixing a burst tyre, seem a little lame and out of keeping with the frenetic, kinetic, high speed pace of Stray Cat Rock - Delinquent Girl Boss (reviewed here). One moment, where a rival gang are introduced with comic book bubbles instead of sounds almost won me over but... no, it was a nice idea but it didn’t quite make it.

That being said, it’s not a bad film... I had a good time with it but, its not great to compare this one to the first entry in the series, I think. There are nice moments like Charles Bronson’s face advertising Mandom Cologne on a poster used as a visual metaphor for Ganishin’s personality and appearance, at one point. There’s an interesting diversion where Debo is digging up holes around a school at midnight over a series of nights which has a nice pay off... kinda tying into the fatal craziness of the end of the picture. There’s even a cameo appearance of the night club footage of Akiko Wada singing from the first film tracked in (I think) as a cross cut audio commentary on the state of Takeo’s mind at one point... although it’s a bit bizarre to have this character just suddenly turn up as a non-sequiter like this. Actually, I can’t find confirmation anywhere on the internet but I’m pretty sure she has a very small cameo at the start of the movie too... as the ‘cop’ who breaks up the other gang from beating up Takeo at the start. If anyone could confirm it in the comments section below, that would be nice.

And other than that... yeah, Stray Cat Rock - Wild Jumbo is a fine film and entertaining enough but it’s not compulsive like the first one. I’d watch it again though... it just feels like a strange fit and change of pace for the series. I don’t remember too much about Stray Cat Rock - Sex Hunter (even though I’ve seen it at least twice, once at the cinema) but it has the same director as the first movie and I’ll be rewatching that one next. Review coming soon to this very blog.