Rating: **
Alternate Titles: "Zubeko Bancho Yume wa Yoru Hiraku", "Tokyo Bad Girls"
Review Date: 1/28/19
Cast: Reiko Oshida, Junko Miyazono
Rika Kageyama (Reiko Oshida) has just graduated from the Akagi Girls' School for juvenile delinquents. Her first attempt to find an honest job ends with her lecherous boss nearly raping her, so she ends up working at a bar for a woman named Umeko (Junko Miyazono). A nasty Yakuza boss wants to buy Umeko's property, which leads to kidnapping, extortion, murder, and finally, revenge.
This first film in the "Delinquent Girl Boss" series is pretty tame and lighthearted as far as pinky violence films go, and the radiant Reiko Oshida is definitely more on the "carefree and mischievous" end of the bad girl spectrum. She's a playful and uninhibited actress who wears mini-skirts with unwavering confidence, flashes her underwear with sly indifference, and cheerfully doffs her clothes on a moment's whim. Rika is the fun and adventurous girlfriend every boy dreams of having, but she also has a prickly past and isn't afraid to resort to violence. It's a well-made production with good acting and good cinematography, but the action scenes tend to be weak and unconvincing. The majority of the film is just aimless filler material that touches on sex, drugs, greed, hardship, betrayal, teen angst, and escalating tensions with rival gangs. The torture and rape that tends to be prevalent in the genre is minimal, and things only become messy at the very end when Umeko storms the bad guys' headquarters. It's a minor and unremarkable entry in the pinky violence genre, made memorable by Ms. Oshida's sweet and sexy charms.