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 - Delinquent Girl Boss

Delinquent We Stand

Stray Cat Rock -
Delinquent Girl Boss
aka Nora-neko rokku:
Onna banchô
Japan 1970
Directed by Yasuharu Hasebe
Nikkatsu/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B
As part of Arrow’s Stray Cat Rock Dual Edition Set

I’ve only ever been able to see the third of the five Stray Cat Rock movies over here in the UK, previously. I have an old Region 1 DVD copy of Stray Cat Rock - Sex Hunter which I loved and, a few years after I bought that, the NFT showed the same one as part of a festival of Japanese cinema they had programmed (I was luck enough to see one of the early Zatoichi movies on a big screen in that season too), so I went to see it on the kind of screen it was shot for. But, for some reason, I’d never come across subtitled copies of the whole series before Arrow released this lovely Blu Ray set a few years ago... which I’ve now finally got around to cracking open. I have to say, this is a real treat.

First things first... I have to give appreciation to Jasper Sharp, a man I have come to respect as somewhat of an authority on the art of Japanese cinema over the years (and also slime moulds and fungi but, that’s another story). He wrote the accompanying booklet in this set and it alerted me to the fact that, since I’d only ever seen the third, that while the films retain some of the same actors throughout... most notably the young ‘superstar on the rise’ Meiko Kaji, receiving only second billing here... there are no running characters and so it’s a series really only in terms of it focuses on youth culture and ‘girl gangs ‘ of the period. I mean, I would have figured out the abstract nature of the idea of a series by the end of this picture because of something which happens (and I won’t spoil that for you here)... but it’s nice to be forewarned sometimes, at any rate. So, loosely connected or otherwise, Nikkatsu (a studio I always tend to associate with crime and action cinema by the likes of Seijun Suzuki), must have really worked their actors hard in those days. The first four Stray Cat Rock movies all came out in the same year with the fifth and final one coming out the following year. I’ve seen a few of these ‘girl gang delinquent’ style films over the years, most notably in a top notch Panik House box set release, The Pinky Violence Collection, from a couple of decades ago (which needs a Blu Ray release please folks) but, I have to say, this first movie of this series, Stray Cat Rock - Delinquent Girl Boss, is probably one of the most amazingly gobsmacking films of this genre I’ve seen.

Now, for the record, I don’t think the ‘good gal’ girl gang in this one are called Stray Cats or even Alley Cats (as in some English translations) so I’m really not sure what the collective title means on this series. However, my best guess is it’s a female equivalent of terms like Stray Dog or Lone Wolf which tend to be used as a metaphor in Japanese films for a kind of maverick, roaming character and this one certainly has that in the form of the actress who actually does have lone status (and top billing above Kaji) in the film and joins in the action as a peripheral to the gang... Akiko Wada as Ako.

Stray Cat Rock - Delinquent Girl Boss must have been one in a whole raft of movies at the time in Japan which were a blast of fresh air on the cinematic climate. I was bowled over when I watched this and I can only assume it had a, perhaps more muted but somewhat similar effect on audiences (especially since they grouped five of these films together under one binding title).

The film starts off with a blue wash of colour and a circle cut out from this reveals the screen, a lone biker, Ako played by Wada, riding up front and centre of the circle which heralds the title card of the movie. She gets into an altercation with a guy in a beach buggy and his gang of bikers, as he rear ends her but, instead of getting in a fight, they just drive off. These are the notorious ‘black shirts’, the thuggish gang employed by a crime syndicate in the city. She speeds after them without ever catching them but the credits as we follow her on the bike are absolutely amazing with the Stray Cat title song pitched against high speed shots rapidly cut together in a way that makes the whole thing just very exciting without once being confusing. Great stuff.

The director makes some really wild stylistic choices on this film about two rival gangs getting into conflicts, after the boyfriend of gang leader Meiko Kaji fails to successfully rig a boxing match for the criminal organisation he works for, losing them a lot of money and potentially his life. There are the usual rivalries between the gangs and also the syndicate as the girls alternatively hide and do battle in a not overly bloody but decidedly nasty series of incidents as everyone crosses paths. It’s well acted but standard stuff in terms of story content but, as I said, it’s not shot in a standard way and it’s an absolute joy to watch.

For starters, the director will suddenly black out portions of the screen artificially to make new shapes. A moment during the titles, for example, has the credits staying where they are but the picture content is further narrowed down to a horizontal slat from the 2.35:1 aspect ratio it is already framed as. And he’ll do things like this to highlight different things at different points. Such as, in one scene, suddenly bringing the sides of the frame in so just the character who is the main subject of the shot is in his own, vertical slice so we can focus on his facial expressions. There’s even a point later on in the film, at the end of the boxing match which is so central to the plot, where he’ll just put washes of different bright colours filled in crudely around characters to isolate them within the frame. It’s not subtle but the rock and roll sensibility of the film and the aggressive editing we’re already used to... not to mention the groovy, psychedelic night club where the girls hang out and listen to the local rock group do their thing... means that the sudden introduction of techniques like this don’t feel in any way out of place with the tone of the movie. They just seem like a natural fit somehow.

Another thing he does, which is far from subtle, is to announce the time stamps in the film in a very ‘in your face’ way. The opening time check is the numbers reversed out of a big, green wash that flashes alternatively against the picture for a second or so and, similarly, he does this throughout with subsequent cards such as Saturday Night flashing  out of pink, Sunday Morning (heralding the moment when the rival gang bikes to the hiding place of our heroes, armed to the teeth) in orange, the denouement of Sunday Night flashing in crimson... perhaps to foreshadow the bloodiness of the fate of some of the characters... and Monday Morning flashing up out of magenta, for the final aftermath and farewell scene. They’re a bit like those rapid cuts Dennis Hopper uses in Easy Rider but with a time fix and it’s a great way for the director to burn the ‘documentary’ detail of the information (an old trick to add a certain weight to a fiction)  into the audience’s collective retina and to make sure we don’t miss it.

I was just in awe of the way this film looks, to be quite honest, especially for the first two thirds. There’s a wonderful moment where Meiko Kaji follows her boyfriend into a street to talk to him. They are only about six feet apart but the director suddenly goes into a split screen and, rather than to show us two separate, simultaneous incidents, the director uses it to dislocate the space of the conversation from our perceptions and focus us on different perspectives. So the boyfriend is in the left half of the screen in long shot, more or less in profile, looking back over his shoulder at his girlfriend but, Kaji is in close up at a different angle dominating the right of the screen... it’s fantastic stuff and a really arresting way of staging the conversation. Then Hasebe reverses it so the boyfriend is in a close up and Kaji is shot from a longer distance. It’s just incredible stuff.

Even the action scenes, such as the fights with the fluid but fast camera movements which will then pull right back to give you a shot of the action all taking place at once as several ‘girl versus girl’ combat scenes are happening simultaneously, makes the whole film completely enthralling. It’s like watching a rock video (the soundtrack to this is cool although, some of the night club songs lose their edge a little) and it’s one of those films you can watch with your toes tapping all the time.

And as if this wasn’t enough... the acting and chemistry from the actors, many of whom I’ve seen in other films (I just can’t put names to faces here) is just amazing. I mean, Meiko Kaji is always great to watch and the tough attitude she conveys coupled with her strong screen presence means you’re always onto a winner (even this early on in her career). However, as brilliant as she is here... and she is... she’s kind of playing second fiddle to the wonderful, attitude filled, tough gal role of Akiko Wada’s lone wolf... err... stray cat kind of character, charming all the girls here who revel in her coolness in a way which almost brings a sapphic admiration to the front (which I’m sure was probably a deliberate move on the part of the director but it’s not spelled out too much here). She’s pretty amazing in this and she and Kaji make a rip roaring pair of main protagonists to get behind on this kaleidoscopic whirlwind of a movie (kaleidoscopic to the point where the director even rotates the frame 360 degrees in one club scene).  

With all this plus an unusual beach buggy versus motorcycle chase, this film is an absolute wonder and, despite some warnings in the back of the booklet about the ‘rawness’ of certain aspects and why they’ve made the restoration decisions they have (bearing in mind I don’t think Arrow restored these themselves, possibly), the film looks absolutely brilliant with a very clear transfer and no picture damage that I could see. Literally, my one grumble was that I wish they’d subtitled one or two more of the Japanese language songs sung by the random groups in the film but, it doesn’t detract from the movie in any way and, frankly, I just loved this first entry in the series. I’m not sure the second one can live up to it but I’ll find out very soon. I’d recommend this to pretty much anyone who wants to see how brilliant the aesthetic visual language of cinema can be utilised to tell even a basic story and capture the imagination. Stray Cat Rock - Delinquent Girl Boss is a real assault on the senses but, you know, not in a bad way and I can’t wait to see what’s in store next (although this director doesn’t return to the series until the third film).