The case goes cold in Japanese Pink Comedy

DIRECTED BY MOTOTSUGU WATANABE/JAPANESE/1998

DVD STREET DATE: FEBRUARY 6, 2024/REDEMPTION FILMS; SACRAMENT (via KINO LORBER)

If this embarrassingly low-budget 1998 comedy were to be believed, Japan has a four-woman undercover vice squad that operates out of what appears to be someone’s tiny apartment.  Its moniker?  The Sexy S.W.A.T. Team!  Seriously, that’s what they want to be called.  Their sole purpose?  Weed and arrest out offending perverts on public transportation and elsewhere.  The ladies’ latest case, however, dishes up far more than they bargained for.  The cast includes Shoko Kudo, Yumika Hayashi (“Japan’s Original Adult Video Queen”), Satomi Shinozaki, Yukiko Izumi, and Nao Saito.

Dr. Smith, the nefarious head of Japan’s Brain Wave Institute, has developed a plastic toy ray gun- er, I mean a high-tech behavior modification beam.  Whenever anyone makes eye contact with its deployed red light, they are instantly overtaken with urgent, randy, moany lust.  Afterwards, the victim remembers nothing.  

So basically, we’ve got a horny old scientist running around with a dollar-store date-rape pistol.  Oddly though, he doesn’t get involved in the subsequent trysts.  The girls instead are made to go for each other, strangers on the train, and even their older male chief (who, frankly, is such a dopey letch that I had pegged him for a secret villain).  

Although the team’s uniform consists of black hot pants, a leather jacket with departmental patches, and dark shades, there’s apparently only two such outfits to be had.  Therefore, for most of the film, the members operate in plainclothes.  You know- miniskirts, high heels, the like.  Later, they get some modified trucker caps sporting monogrammed sheet metal, built to render Dr. Smith’s horny beam limp.

If one is willing to give a pass to the atrocious sexual politics and implications that enable Sexy S.W.A.T. Team (Onna chikan sôsakan: Oshiri de shôbu!) to exist in the first place, one may derive some enjoyment from its cornball antics and Benny Hill Show-level conceits.  Really though, it’s just a small, dumb delivery vehicle for softcore sex scenes.  (Surprise.)  Every actress gets her turn, be it in a bedroom, the “office”, the Brain Wave Institute’s cardboard box storage room, or even in a public toilet.  All of these scenes are over almost as soon as they begin.  

And, it turns out there’s a reason for that.  Since around 1962, erotically themed Japanese film productions (“eroductions”) have been classified as “pink films”[1].  The “pink film” umbrella is a big one, with room beneath it for something like Sexy S.W.A.T. Team.  Pink films were tremendously popular for decades, some critically acclaimed big-budget studio endeavors.  Quite often, pink films were only an hour or so in running time.

The thresholds of what was and wasn’t officially allowed to be shown onscreen in Japan vary wildly from decade to decade, with Sexy S.W.A.T. Team operating from a place of obscuring what essential Japanese film historian Donald Ritchie refers to as the actors’ exposed “working parts”.  Even so, the intimate scenes get pretty gropy before they abruptly end.  While this plus the fact that it’s only an hour long would seem to indicate that this is an edited-down version.  All signs point to that not being the case.

All that to contextualize things.  Though it’s a thoroughly slight piffle of a movie, Sexy S.W.A.T. Team conforms to certain conventions of yore, some of which may’ve been very much in force circa 1998.  Unfortunately, the DVD release of the film from Redemption Films’ sublabel Sacrament got even less care than the movie itself got as it was being made.  The picture quality is muddy with yellow English subtitles baked in.  Extras include only in-house trailers and company blurbs.  

All that said, for all of Sexy S.W.A.T. Team’s shortcomings, director Mototsugu Watanabe keeps things moving with an unmistakable spirit of high levity.  As Sexy S.W.A.T. Team is considered a “pink” film, it has to turn on the red light.  But it’s nothing that a few modified trucker caps and dark shades can’t swat down.  

[1] [Quoted from Wikipedia’s entry on Pink Films…]

Donald Richie and Pia Harritz enumerate the fundamental elements of the pink film formula as:

  1. The film must have a required minimum quota of sex scenes.
  2. The film must be approximately one hour in duration.
  3. It must be filmed on 16 mm or 35 mm film within one week.
  4. The film must be made on a very limited budget.