The first movie in the Delinquent Girl Boss series — perhaps not to be confused with 1970’s Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss* — this Kazuhiko Yamaguchi (Sister Street Fighter, Wolfguy: Enraged Lycanthrope) film introduces Rika Kageyama (Reiko Ôshida), the titular girl boss who will appear in a series of four movies.

We find Rika graduating from reform school and supposedly being ready for a bright and cheerful life, putting the crimes of her youth behind her, but would a Japanese Pinky Violence film be interesting at all if Riku stayed on the straight and narrow path?

After a job at a laundry ends with the owner attempting to force himself on her and his wife blaming the victim, Riku gets a job at a hostess club. The Yakuza is trying to muscle in on this place, so she must come to the rescue of the other girls that work there, even if she has to put her own virtue on the line to do so.

While this film doesn’t go to the depraved depths of many Pinky Violence films, it also displays the juxtaposition at the heart of so many films in this genre: it puts its heroines in danger tinged with sexual violence, but it also presents them as capable characters who have agency and stand with one another against the abusive men in their universe. At the same time that these films invite you to watch what happens, it reminds you that you are just as wrong as any of the men who treat these women so horribly.

*Toei made the same series and the band Golden Half shows up in this, playing the same “Yellow Cherry” song that they rocked out in Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter.