June 22: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Revenge! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Norifumi Suzuki is probably best known for the ten-movie Torakku Yarō series in which Momojiro Hoshi and Kinya Aikawa race around Japan in dekotora or highly decorated trucks. Suzuki also wrote Red Peony Gambler, which became an eight-film series. He also made School of the Holy Beast.

Christina Lindberg, the star of Thriller, was on a plane to Stockholm when she was approached by two Japanese men who asked if she’d like to be in a movie. That sounds like the plot of a TV movie, but she said, “Why not?” and in a few weeks was making this movie and Sadao Nakajima’s Porno Queen: Japan Sex Tour for Toei.

The star of the show, though, is Reiko Ike. She first appeared in Toei’s Hot Springs Mimizu Geisha just a year before and claimed that she was only sixteen when she was nude in that movie. The scandal made it one of Toei’s biggest movies and her a star. One of the icons of Japanese Pinky violence films, Ike is on the same level as a Pam Grier or Tura Satana here in America. She’s in all four Terror Female High School movies, as well as one of the Battles Without Honor or Humanity sequels and The Street Fighter’s Last Revenge. She even released an album, Kōkotsu No Sekai (World of Ecstasy) AKA You, Baby before she was busted for drugs and then illegal gambling before her retirement.

Look out Donna Summer, because the entire album is basically spy lounge with Ike orgasming over it. It’s also beyond incredible.

Ike plays Ocho Inoshika in this, a young girl living the life of a small-time criminal in 1920s Tokyo. While all she does is gamble and occasionally steal from people, she’s also seeking the men who killed her detective father when he learned too much about the wrong powerful people.

After watching a young anarchist get killed, she listens to the young man’s dying request. He asks Ocho to take all of his money and free his sister Yuki from a life of prostitution. When she meets the brothel owner, he demands that Ocho play against female gambler Christina (Lindberg) for Yuki’s ownership. During this game, we see flashbacks to the lives of both women. And Christina is here for a reason, as she’s tracking down the anarchists to keep the local government running or so she says, because she’s really here because a young Japanese anarchist made love to her like no one before or since. He also has made a slave of Ocho’s mother, so as you can imagine, everyone is going to die.

Ocho is getting closer to those who killed her father — they have the tattoos of a deer, a butterfly and a boar on their backs — and that means plenty of bloody sword battles, including one where she emerges from a tub fully nude and battles into the snow. As she kills everyone in her path, limbs fly through the air, blood sprays like it’s being shot out of a cannon and her nude form is covered in plasma. It’s one of the most incredible scenes that you will see in any movie ever.

There’s also a battle in front of a stained glass window of Jesus, a whipping scene that aspires to become anything but exploitation junk and an ending in which our heroine emerges triumph amongst a snow of falling playing cards.

Any time people get all high and mighty about films and act like scholars, I’m reminded that I’ll never get there because this is the kind of movie that I prefer. I would have it no other way.

This has a sequel as well, Female Yakuza Tale: Inquisition and Torture.