Yakuza Justice: Erotic Code Of Honour (Japan, 1973)

This film has several titles but I'm just rolling with Yakuza Justice m'kay. This is a flick that really surprised me, coming from a director of mainly pink films ,Tatsumi Kumashiro, it is a merging of crafted skin cinema with the brutality of a yakuza piece.

The story begins twenty odd years in the past when a monk fishes a dead pregnant lady out of a river. She gives birth to a baby who he takes to the monastery and is subsequently raised as a monk himself, gaining the name Seigen. He is a good monk until he rescues a young woman from some thugs and promptly shows he thanks by shagging him silly. This leaves Seigen rather confused.

Even more confused when he discovers her father, a mob boss, is his dad too by different mothers. This drives him nuts and he quits the monks, descending into a life of crime and vice. He fucks whores, kills gangsters, gets inked and broods about his half sister. All the while he is haunted by the monk that fished his mother out of the river and by endless sights of butterflies.

This is a brisk movie that is part sex, part violent crime drama and part theological art piece. Rife with symbolism of running water, butterflies, mountains and women nursing children you can easily not follow the meanings when you have no knowledge of Buddhism. That doesn't really matter as it just adds an enigmatic yet serene aura to a dirty, direct piece of 70s gang cinema. Seigen is a truly nihilistic prick, a capable killer with both gun and even a shovel.

Violence wise, this is chock full of the red stuff. Garish and bright red! There's an assassination in a bar set to a Japanese folk song, a knife fight in a wheat field and several beat downs along with a superb machine gun massacre. Oh my god! I loved it all!

The sex scenes are brief and hard, only problem is an annoying black bar that appears to cover bums and fannies. This film really hits all the right notes, makes me wish that the category III era of Hong Kong movies could have produced this kind of artful blend of gang vice and violence. I'm definitely delving more into the pink violence world if there is anything else out there that comes close to this sleazy little bugger.