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Released by: Arrow
Released on: July 14, 2015
Directors: Yasuharu Hasebe, Toshiya Fujita
Cast: Akiko Wada, Meiko Kaji, Koji Wada, Bunjaka Han, Yuka Kemari, Ken Sanders, Takeo Chii, Tatsuya Fuji, Rikiya Yasuoka
Year: 1970-71
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The Movies:
Delinquent Girl Boss: When a gang of delinquent yet good-hearted girls, led by their boss Mei, clashes with a bad-girl gang, the latter's boyfriends join in to give the bad girls an unfair advantage. Luckily for the good girls, however, badass biker chick Ako shows up, leads them to victory, and becomes their de facto leader. At the same time, Mei is trying to convince her boyfriend Michio to end his involvement with Seiyu, a multi-tentacled criminal organization. But Michio, finagling his way into Seiyu's good graces, is neck-deep in a plot to have his boxer friend Kelly throw a fight on which the group has heavily gambled. Things with that plan go horribly awry, however. When Ako and Mei show up to cheer Kelly on, he decides that it's too humiliating to lose in front of them and changes his mind about taking a dive. Michio is tortured in retaliation, and it's up to Ako, Mei, and the other delinquent girls to rescue him.
Wild Jumbo: Three young men who have little better to do than to ride around in a jeep all day spy a beautiful woman, shoot out her car's tires, and kidnap her for nefarious purposes. They eventually let her go, though not before she develops an obsession with the group's leader. As the two fall in love, she confesses that she's been having an affair with the head of a secretive and wealthy religious organization. Before long, the trio and their former hostage hatch a plot to infiltrate and rob the group with the aid of World War II weapons that have fortuitously been hidden nearby.
Sex Hunter: The Alleycats and The Eagles are rival gangs, the former consisting of women and the latter of men. Mako, who heads up The Alleycats, is having an affair with Baron, the violent leader of The Eagles. A mysterious stranger named Kazuma, who needs help finding his missing sister, shows up. Mako offers to help him, but there's an issue: he's biracial, and Baron HATES biracial people. In due course, Mako dumps Baron for Kazuma, leading to a heated confrontation between the gangs.
Machine Animal: After evening up the score with the white men who tried to rape them the night before, Maya and her girl gang meet a second group of men. One of them is an American military deserter, trying to sell drugs to finance an escape to Europe and avoid a forced return to battle in Vietnam. But a rival male gang hopes to get in on the drug action, leaving the delinquent girls to thwart their plans.
Beat '71: As the result of a frame-up orchestrated by her boyfriend's father, Furiko is wrongly arrested for the murder of a member of a rival gang. Her own gang lives in a commune where they spend all their time having sex and doing drugs. If they don't take a break and help her, however, she'll rot in jail, particularly after she's released and arrested again!
The Nikkatsu Corporation is Japan's oldest major movie studio. Its Stray Cat Rock series was crafted in the early seventies to cash in on the market being milked by Toei Studios' successful Delinquent Boss series (hence the first title here). To ensure its success, Nikkatsu hired Yasuharu Hasebe and Toshiya Fujita to helm the films. Hasebe had entered cinema in 1958 as an assistant director for Nikkatsu, but after the critical and commercial success of his 1966 debut directorial effort, Black Tight Killers, he quickly moved up the ranks at the studio. He oversaw one, three, and four in the Stray Cat Rock series, while Fujita, who later directed the Lady Snowblood films, tackled two and five.
Stray Cat Rock is difficult to pigeonhole. The first film concerns a gang of girl bikers who do very little actual biking, while the second both eschews the biking angle and switches focus to a gang of males. The third film mixes it up with girl and guy gangs alike, and the two final pictures in the series barely contain girl gangs at all. There's also the fact that, despite the connecting titles, none of the films has anything to do with any of the others. The first entry was intended to be a vehicle for pop star Akiko Wada, and indeed, she gets a lot of screen time for singing. But it was costar Meiko Kaji as Mei who wound up being the real hit with audiences, so Wada was left out in the cold after film one (although a couple of her outtakes were stuck into the second film.) Compounding the oddness is the fact that, while Kaji appears in every film, she's a different character each time.
Kaji then, in her various incarnations, is the only connecting tissue in the series, each entry of which places its similar material in a different light. The first film is decidedly urban in nature, with a drab design and a focus on rock and roll; the second is mostly rural and generally more colorful, while the third is suburban. Each of the three takes an experimental approach that is lacking in the final two. All five do succeed to one degree or another, due in large part to naturalistic performances from the actors. And although the series admittedly wears a bit thin well before it concludes, none of the films overstays its welcome, with each clocking in at less than 90 minutes.
Audio/Video/Extras:
Arrow Films first released Stray Cat Rock: The Collection on Blu-ray and DVD in Great Britain in late 2014, then followed up that release with another in the United States in July of 2015. This review is concerned only with the U.S. Blu-ray discs. Following in Twilight Time's footsteps, Arrow has limited the pressings to 3,000 units. The films have been spread across two 50GB discs, with Delinquent Girl Boss, Wild Jumbo, and Sex Hunter on the first and Machine Animal and Beat '71 on the second. Both discs are MPEG-4 AVC encoded in 1080p high definition, and all five are presented in their original 2.35:1 theatrical aspect ratios, though the transfers vary in quality and were obviously at the mercy of the original film elements. The first three films are generally visually solid, with nice detail and only a few moments of softness. Color reproduction is good but not great, some of which can be attributed to the color schemes chosen by the directors and the relative cheapness of the production. Black areas exhibit some crush, and there's a fair amount of dirt and debris throughout (which will enhance the filmic experience for some viewers). There's also a fair amount of grain in the darker sequences. The final two films, on the other hand, look fantastic, with a great deal of sharpness, gorgeous color timing, organic and non-obtrusive grain, and little crush. In all, the set should be a visually pleasing experience for consumers.
The soundtracks for all five films have been placed in uncompressed Japanese LPCM audio, with optional English subtitles newly created for Arrow's release. There are no issues to report with the sound; there's occasional hiss but it's minor and scattered. The scores are comprised of jazz and rock songs which come through as loud and clear as they should. Dialogue is nicely rendered.
There's a fair number of extras. Trailers for four of the five films are included: Wild Jumbo (2:42), Sex Hunter (3:16), Machine Animal (2:48), and Beat '71 (2:37). These trailers emphasize the rock and action elements of the films. There are also violent elements, though these never reach the level of the country's standard horror films of the period. There are interviews with directors Yasuharu Hasebe (28:37) and Tatsuya Fuji (30:06), as well as actor Yoshio Harada (33:06). As with the feature films, all are in Japanese with English-language subtitles.
The Final Word:
Though the Stray Cat Rock Collection may be a mixed bag in terms of content and visual quality, three of them look good and two of them look fantastic. The audio is nice, and there are a number of decent extras, including trailers for four of the films and lengthy interviews with three of the series' participants. The films, with the exception of Sex Hunter, have been difficult to come by in the United States, and now they're readily available and well-presented at a reasonable price. That should please any fan of wild and wooly Japanese cinema.
Christopher D. Workman is a freelance writer, film critic, and co-author (with Troy Howarth) of Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the 1930s, available from Midnight Marquee Press.
Click on the images below for full sized Blu-ray screen caps!
