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| Images courtesy of Radiance Films |
Years before becoming one of Nikkatsu’s top players with Massacre
Gun, the Alleycat Rock movies and canonizing the short-lived
Nikkatsu Violent Pink movement of roughie Roman Porno films ala Assault!
Jack the Ripper and Rape! 13th Hour, Nikkatsu film worker
turned auteur Yasuharu Hasebe worked his way up the chain of command including
but not limited to an elongated apprenticeship with fellow Nikkatsu
troublemaker Seijun Suzuki before making his own features.
Starting out in 1966 with his first directorial effort Black
Tight Killers based on the novel Tripe Exposure by Michio Tsuzuki
adapted for the screen by Ryuzo Nakanishi, the film was among the first
Japanese movies depicting a tight ironclad team of female ninjas while also
providing something of an alternative to the multicolored lights of Seijun
Suzuki. At once the least likely Hasebe
effort and also a harbinger of things to come in his more extreme later work, Black
Tight Killers remained one of the filmmaker’s least seen efforts until now
thanks to Radiance Films’ ongoing efforts to license and publish hard-to-find renowned
classics of world cinema to the domestic stage.
When a former wartime photographer named Hondo (Akira
Kobayashi) sees an airplane stewardess named Yoriko (Chieko Matsubara)
kidnapped by a team of black skin-tight leather clad female ninja assassins who
use everything from swords to vinyl records as weapons, he mounts his own
investigation and uncovers a web of co-conspirators including but not limited
to the yakuza and American mafia to pilfer a buried stash of stolen WWII gold. Dodging go-go dancers and mod clubbers of the
swinging psychedelic sixties, soon our hero finds himself joining forces with
the so-called Black Tight Killers in an effort to rescue his new love of
his life Yoriko while bullets and 45rpm vinyl records fly through the air.
Spring boarding from the psychedelia unleashed by Seijun
Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter released the same year but far less screwy than
Suzuki’s lunatic romps, Black Tight Killers with its slick and ultra-hip
female assassins who would feel right at home in Russ Meyer’s Faster,
Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Tura Satana’s black cloaked femme fatale is a
wild, funky beast of an action thriller.
Wall to wall with gaudy, garish neon-lit multicolored imagery and
strikingly trippy set pieces and even stranger rear projections echoing the
antics of Suzuki but unlike Suzuki sporting strong individual female characters
fearless of taking on men twice their size on the battleground, the first
official feature film of Yasuharu Hasebe is startling for how playful it
is. While, yes, brutally violent, the
film has a sharp sense of humor and a cavalcade of spunky female characters
unafraid to shake things up and take a few kicks and punches in stride.
Sheer visual eye candy lensed in 2.35:1 Nikkatsuscope by
none other than Seijun Suzuki’s longtime cinematographer Kazue Nagatsuka, Black
Tight Killers when it isn’t slicing, dicing and firing bullets away is a
playfully almost hyperkinetic visual delight.
Perhaps the most colorful Hasebe to date whose visual aesthete became
increasingly utilitarian with his eventual foray into the Violent Pink
movement, Black Tight Killers even without its jazzy score by The
Burmese Harp composer Naozumi Yamamoto is a deliciously anachronistic dose
of heightened reality. Akira Kobayashi
from Kinji Fukusaku’s Battles Without Honor and Humanity makes a strong
male lead and Chieko Matsubara somehow did both this movie and Tokyo Drifter
within the same year, though the real starlets are the five assassins play
with spunky yet girlish glee by the ensemble cast.
Critically and commercially well received and somehow
winning the hearts of Nikkatsu studio suits while mentor Seijun Suzuki was
getting into hot water with them, Black Tight Killers immediately
ushered in Yasuharu Hasebe as a formidable new filmmaking talent for the
Japanese filmmaking empire. Considerably
more playfully magical in its mixture of pop manga comic book unrealism and
hard blood-soaked yakuza violence, the film is almost something of a sugary
sweet lark.
Almost as fun to look at if
not more than the director whose work clearly inspired it, Black Tight
Killers is a surefire yakuza ninja assassins escapist delight whose tough
and hip sixties mod assassins absolutely had to play a role in what would or
would not become Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1. All in all, another fantastic home run from
Radiance Films who continue to remain at the forefront of the home video
boutique label releasing industry.
--Andrew Kotwicki
