Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (1974)

Continuing my entirely accidental journey through Japanese pop culture past, I found Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (1974), an example, apparently, of the 'Pinky Crime' genre, showing on a streaming channel the other night.  Extremely violent, with a lot of explicit sexual content, at first glance this might appear to be a million miles from the Sukeban Deka TV series I was talking about last time.  The again, this tale's undercover female police assassin protagonist could well be what the 'delinquent girl detectives' become when they grow up.  That said, the film predates the first Sukeban Deka TV series by more than a decade and while the TV show was clearly aimed at an adolescent audience, Zero Woman sits firmly in the category of 'adult entertainment'.  Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs sets its tone from pretty much the first frame, with a foreign diplomat taking a girl to hotel room for some - as it turns out - bondage action.  She gets naked and felt up pretty quickly, but when he starts to get out his whips and stuff, she suddenly produces a gun  and those red handcuffs, revealing herself as a cop and confronts him over the death of another girl in one of his sessions. In response, he just produces his passport and invokes diplomatic immunity.  So she shoots him.  As it turns out, although she - Rei-  is an undercover cop from a secret division authorised to kill certain criminals without trial or conviction, she hadn't been authorised this time, acting instead for personal reasons.  Consequently, she finds herself thrown in jail, where the other inmates recognise her as a cop and strip and beat her.  

Which, in effect, constitutes a scene-setting pre title sequence, much in the mode of a Bond movie.  The plot proper starts after the titles, with a thug being released from prison, re-uniting with his gang and going off to attack a courting couple, killing the guy and gang-raping and kidnapping the girl, who they then try and sell into the sex trade.  The female associate they try selling her to recognises her as the daughter of a powerful politician, a man set to become Prime Minister.  So, naturally, they decide to hold her for ransom.  Wanting to keep the kidnapping out of the headlines, in order to avoid the scandal and possible dishonour involved, the politician calls in the secret police division to sort things out.  Rei finds herself retrieved from prison, with orders to infiltrate the kidnap gang, retrieve the girl unharmed and kill the entire gang.  Doing this involves Rei getting brutally beaten and sexually assaulted by the gang in order to prove that she isn't the cop.  Following this 'baptism of fire', she sets about turning the gang members against each other, until there are only three left, with their leader now half crazed and paranoid after being forced to kill his own brother, having caught him trying to help the kidnapped girl escape.  Moving their hostage to a disused US Navy base, they take more hostages, raping the women.  Rei sows more dissent.  The cops torture a captured gang member to turn him against the gang, but he ends up betraying Rei, who is subjected to a further brutal beating.  The politician, knowing now that his daughter has been repeatedly raped and drugged, fears he will be disnonoured if the kidnapping ever becomes public, so the order is given that everyone involved, including Rei and the girl, have to die. Subsequently, the additional hostages are left to burn by the cops as the remaining gang members set a fire to cover their escape, with the two women as hostages.  After a car chase, Rei inevitablt turns the tables on both criminals and cops.

There is no disputing that Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs is very well made, packing a lot of incident into a scant eighty eight minute running time.  Nevertheless, despite the relatively short running time, the film refuses to move at a breakneck pace, instead taking the time to build up  the various characters, establish their relationships and allow Rei's machinations to slowly unfold.  When the action does occur, it pretty much explodes, with outbursts of disturbing, but well choreographed, violence.  Good direction from Yukio Noda - who specialised in this sort of tough, action-orientated drama - is backed up by good performances from the cast.  Tetsuro Tamba is suitably glacial as the calculating, ruthless politician, while Miki Sugimoto as Rei is eerily impassive looking for much of the action, suggesting someone who has become anesthetised to the brutality and violence she is immersed in and has come to accept the physical and sexual abuse she endures as an integral part of her job.  Her delicate beauty belies her ruthlessness and toughness.  But the levels of violence - which is principally directed at women - is disturbing and often difficult to watch.  While, arguably, it isn't entirely gratuitous, being intended to establish not only the scale of the villains' moral degeneracy and misogyny  (you can tell they are scum as one of Rei's rapists has shit stains down the back of his underpants), but also the way in which the authorities are no better, being equally willing to exploit women's bodies in the name of 'justice', that doesn't make it any easier to watch.  Moreover, it reduces women, for the most part, to the role of passive victims.  Even Rei - despite the opening holding the promise of her being a kick ass action heroine -spends most of the film passively allowing herself to be abused in order to develop her plan and maintain her cover. At least she's able to spring into action at he film's climax, ruthlessly dispatching both gang members and cops.

Of course, this victimisation of even what are meant to be strong female characters isn't restricted to Japanese films of the era: I had much the same problem with the US seventies sexploitation actioner Ginger, where the titular character, despite having established her kick ass credentials, is climactically forced to endure rape, beating and drugging, only being rescued thanks to the intervention of a male character.  Vulnerability, these scenarios seem to argue, is an essential part of femininity and even the toughest of heroines have to demonstrate it in order to make them acceptable to male audiences.  Still Rei is, at least, allowed to rescue herself.  By the eighties and nineties, in the West at least, the action heroine no longer had to demonstrate their femininity by ordeal, but could just kick ass as well as any man, as Maria Ford in Angel of Destruction, (or even Linda Blair in Savage Streets), demonstrated.  In Japan, things appear to have been somewhat more complicated.  While the Sukeban Deka TV series could, arguably, be seen as a toned down version of the Zero Woman format aimed at younger viewers, in its original iteration, at least, it still insisted on putting its heroine through ordeals.  Having recently seen the first six episodes of the first Sukeban Deka series, I was struck at how much darker and more violent it was than subsequent series.  Not only is its heroine blackmailed by the authorities into working undercover for them, (her mother is on death row, her execution held off as long as Saki co-operates), but she does tend to get slapped around quite a bit by various antagonists, (although she always eventually triumphs with the aid of her yo-yo).  In one episode, for instance, she allows herself to be captured by kidnappers in order to get close to their victim, which involves her being being beaten up by three gang members.  While it might be seen as integral to the plot, the sight of three grown men slapping a teenage girl around (in the case of the first Sukeban Deka, a physically small teenager at that), remains as unappealing as seeing a grown woman beaten and raped in the name of 'duty' in Zero Woman.  Thankfully, the subsequent two series took a lighter tone, with their young heroines avoiding such ordeals.

Getting back to Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs, the film proved a big success on its release, spawning a series of films, all featuring a different actress in the title role, but all following a similar format.  While stopping short of full frontal nudity, Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs presents far stronger material than could be found in any similar Western 'mainstream' film of the era, with its explicit scenes of sexual violence against women.  Not only is such material unsettling, (as it should be and is clearly intended to be), its inclusion in a film being presented primarily as a crime thriller, a piece of entertainment, always begs to the question to whether its purpose is as much 'entertainment' and voyeuristic titillation as it is to make a moral point about the objectification and brutalisation of women by those in power, whether that be criminal or 'legitimate' power.  There is, of course, no simple answer here.  Certainly, I don't have one.  While this aspect of Zero Woman undoubtedly made me wince, (to put it mildly), it didn't put me off watching it and appreciating it for the thoroughly well made and superior piece of exploitation that it is.  Oh and those red handcuffs - I was perplexed by the fact that the first few times she whipped these out, Rei was stark naked, leaving me to ponder just where she had been concealing them.  Thankfully, the film later makes clear that they are kept concealed in a secret compartment of her hand bag, which she always has close at hand.  Which came as quite a relief.