Girl’s Pleasure: Man Hunting (1977) Yokosuka otoko-gari: shoujo kairaku | Region-Free (Blu-Ray)

Presented in 1080p with English subtitles

Title: Girl’s Pleasure: Man Hunting (1977)

Alternate Title: Yokosuka otokogari shōjo etsuraku

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Plot Synopsis:
Two high school friends experience traumatic events that alter their lives. One witnesses the brutal r@pe of her sister-in-law during a home invasion, leading her to harbor a deep-seated hatred towards men. The other loses her virginity to an African-American soldier, resulting in a complex emotional journey. Together, they embark on a path of discovery and revenge, confronting their inner demons and societal challenges.

Cast and Crew:

• Director: Toshiya Fujita
• Writers: Toshiya Fujita, Machiko Nasu
• Cast:
  • Kaori Ono as Makiko Yoshimura
  • Jun Nakagawa as Michiko Mita
  • Shigeru Yazaki as Mitsuo
  • Moeko Ezawa as Yoshie Mita
  • Aya Origuchi as Yaeko

IMDb Link:
Girl’s Pleasure: Man Hunting (1977)

Reviews from Letterboxd:

1. Alan Lawrence – ★★☆☆☆
   “Later on in his career, director Toshiya Fujita was himself one of the stars of Seijun Suzuki’s masterpiece, Zigeunerweisen––and he did a cameo in Nobuhiko Obayashi’s adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s manga, Blackjack, called The Stranger in the Eye. These are, for me, highlights of what seems to me so far a very middling career. Fujita’s work as a director is, in the six films I’ve now seen, unremarkable, slow and hard to parse to achieve any sort of meaning. One wonders here whether the title, ‘Girl’s Pleasure: Man Hunting’ was meant to be ironic, since none of the girls in the film seem to achieve any sort of pleasure…but then again, why would they make that an ironic title, when to do so would sort of invalidate any point the premise or the genre would normally provide? Fujita is well-known to use heavy improvisation on his sets, giving actors broad freedoms in order to encourage involved performances. This seldom engenders realistic performances, interestingly enough, and Fujita’s approach always leans towards melodrama. The common problem amongst Fujita’s films seems to come from this loose, freewheeling attitude, and the lack of authorial vision that seems to most often create. Even films like Lady Snowblood adaptations––drawn not only from an adapted source, but also from a pre–visualized one––suffer from a slackness and a lack of focus that wastes Meiko Kaji’s focus and intensity. Fujita’s Stray Cat Rock films pale in comparison to the intensity of the Yasuharu Hasebe ones. This film has a similar lack of focus and fluctuating intensity. There are long r4pe scenes, action at the end, and none of it adds up to any sort of real story arc. The young girls who are the protagonists (one in particular; the other is off to the side most of the time) don’t seem to be heading anywhere, and Fujita’s analysis of their outlook is superficial. The principal girl’s sister-in-law is r4ped, and she spends the movie hating men and eventually trying to find her sister-in-law’s rapist. This really leads to nothing. There is, I suppose, some man hunting that goes on, like in the title. There really isn’t any girl’s pleasure. If that’s the point, it’s unclear where that point is meant to go. At the end of the day, there is nothing about the movie that seems to mean much. The violent tone seems to have been adapted in order to capitalize on the success of Yasuharu Hasebe’s debut of the ‘violent pink’ film the previous year, with ‘R4pe!’ That film, in spite of the possibly off-putting directness of its title, is a much more ambiguous yet artistically focused feature, with an understanding of human sensitivity and literary duality which seems to evade Fujita entirely. And a much more interesting film about two high school girls getting curious about s&x comes the next year, with Koyu Ohara’s Pink Hip Girls. As for this one, the decent performances lead to no point, and the film just doesn’t congeal into any satisfying form. Maybe just because of the impact of Zigeunerweisen on me, I continue to find Toshiya Fujita’s films as a director interesting. He joins Nikkatsu the same year as Seijun Suzuki, but works in publicity in the years Suzuki advanced to be a visionary director––and Fujita only found his directorial opportunities as the Nikkatsu of the swinging sixties was waning––the pink era was when he directed most of his films. I plan to see more of them, for sure, but I have yet to see the Fujita film that is more successful than it is superficially intriguing.”
2. Outrage – ★½☆☆☆
   “Feels like a shitty knock-off of what Yukihiro Sawada was doing a couple years prior. All the themes you usually pull out when you want to make your roman p0rn0 political are there but they’re kind of just put on the table and left to rot. On one hand, it’s a very upsetting movie with several long s&xual assault scenes that even attempts to show the mental after-effects, but it also really wants to be a light-hearted comedy about two teenagers having fun at the same time, with all the broken English, dirty drawings, dancing and obvious comedic relief. And it really clashes, in a very non-fun way. Over-all, it ends up feeling very generic and uninteresting.”
3. BenAfflecked – ★☆☆☆☆
   “I wasn’t in the mood to watch women getting r4ped, sorry.”

Meta Description:
“Girl’s Pleasure: Man Hunting” (1977), directed by Toshiya Fujita, is a Japanese drama-thriller that follows two high school friends as they navigate traumatic experiences and seek revenge, delving into themes of violence, s&xuality, and retribution.