The Pinky Violence Collection

The Pinky Violence Collection is a fantastic entry-point to a genre that, until very recently, was almost completely inaccessible to the Western viewer. In the 1970s, facing stiff competition from television, the Japanese film industry fought back by providing viewers with what television couldn’t – excessive sex and violence. Nikkatsu started with its Roman-Porno line of bizarre soft-core films, and Toei, in response, chose to follow a more action-oriented route. The resulting Pinky Violence films featured female heroines, and unprecedented levels of on-screen sex and violence. The closest parallel would be the blaxploitation films of the U.S., which created a similarly heady mix of eroticism, action, and social justice. Similarly, the Pinky Violence films blur the line between empowerment and exploitation. Just as blaxploitation films were among the first to star strong African-American protagonists but simultaneously traded in the crudest stereotypes possible, the Pinky Violence films depicted strong, independent female characters, while subjecting them to intensely degrading situations, and filling the screen with gratuitous nudity.

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