Terrifying Girls' High School: Women's Violent Classroom (

1972

) ½

If I had to sum up the plot of the first entry in the Terrifying Girls High School series in a word, it would be “anarchic.” Seemingly important characters vanish from the movie without a trace. Otherwise rational people hatch bizarre and insane plots that defy any explanation. Secret motivations and histories are made up for major characters in the last moments of the film, which makes their actions up to this point completely incomprehensible. Even basic thematic rules, such as the gradual escalation of a conflict, are tossed aside without regard. Now, as an excuse to get a mob of barely legal girls into (and more importantly out of) sailor fuku, this is all well and good. However, if you are watching the film and trying earnestly to follow its story and understand its characters (fool that you are), the experience is disorienting to say the least. Casual viewers of weird movies will probably be turned off, but for me, it's a rare treat to find a movie that is so capable of repeatedly surprising and confounding me. I can't say that Terrifying Girls High School: Women's Violent Classroom is a good movie, but I would be lying if I pretended it wasn't extremely entertaining and refreshingly unique. It's certainly a hell of an introduction to the pinku sub-genre of sukeban (the Japanese word for schoolgirl delinquents).

We begin with credits rolling over a classroom so unruly that it passes quickly from terrifying (as the title promises) into the realm of the absurd. While their teacher tries vainly to instruct them, the girls are all busy scarfing down their lunches, taking naps, chatting with their friends, painting their nails, masturbating, or huffing glue out of condoms. All this unfolds while some sleazy jazz plays in the background. Welcome to Seiko Girls High School, the toughest school in Japan, with a student body made up almost entirely of delinquent criminals. The sequence is so over-the-top that it borders on parody; indeed, I expected Leslie Nielsen to walk in at any moment and for the Naked Gun 4: Tokyo Drift title-card to drop.

We learn later on in the film that Seiko Girls' High School is a dumping ground for all the worst female delinquents in the region, usually girls who have already been kicked out of at least one school. The faculty is thoroughly demoralized, with one teacher describing the school as a trash can, and the only thing that the teachers can hope to do is sit on the lid to keep the trash from spilling out. The only exception to this atmosphere of pessimism is the school's principal, a pleasant middle-aged woman who is deluded enough to genuinely think that she is helping shape these crazy bitches into good wives and nurturing mothers.

Somehow, running this dump is a profitable enterprise, as the President of Seiko Girls High School (confusingly, a different role than the principal) lives in a mansion with a pool. The movie seems to imply he's gotten rich from abusing his position at the school, but I have trouble understanding just how that is possible. The man runs a high school; he's not a dirty politician or a Union boss in bed with the mob, and there is only so much profit to be made from giving your students sub-standard lunches. Bizarrely, the president sends his own daughter, Sumiko, to the hellhole school he runs, rather than paying her tuition at a posh school. Though Sumiko is quite the hellion in her own right, running the second most infamous gang in the school, so it's possible that she's already been run out of every halfway decent high school in town.

That is almost certainly the case with Sumiko's rival Michiko, who, despite coming from an upper-middle-class family (her father is some kind of local government official), is the biggest delinquent in the school and a terror to faculty and students alike. For most of the film, Michiko is depicted as an absolute monster, the kind of psychopath that will kill a cat so she can hang its corpse up as a warning to a new teacher not to fuck with her (this is not just a colorful supposition; she actually does this at one point). Michiko's actress, Miki Sugimoto, does as good a job of portraying this character as you could hope, and even manages to be intimidating despite the significant handicap of being a small, rather cute, teenage girl.

Michiko at least has a reason for being the way she is, as she was raped by a gang of thugs, and her dad hushed everything up to prevent any damage to his political career. Michiko explains through voice-over narration that on that day, she learned “the rapists win in our society. My lifestyle has changed from being raped to raping.” This goes some way towards justifying the perverse violence Michiko likes to inflict on her rival sukeban. After beating up Sumiko's gang in a street fight, for instance, she claims their panties as trophies. Later, after a larger brawl, she orders the losers to strip naked entirely. It does not really explain why her goons (gonnettes, I suppose, would be the politically correct term) are so keen to follow along with her wishes or why Sumiko, when she captures a couple of girls working as prostitutes for Michiko, ties them up and tortures them by burning their tits. Of course, the real reason for all this is to add a few sleazy moments to the film and draw in its desired audience of leery perverts and raincoat-clad weirdos.

The X-factor in the ongoing struggle between Sumiko and Michiko is a man-with-no-name style transfer student named Yuki, a legendary sukeban from a different city with an agenda all her own. Initially, she seems like she just wants to sit out the ongoing turf war between the gangs and gives every impression of having come to Seiko Girls High School to pursue a life of peace. While she does tag along with Sumiko's gang for a little while in exchange for some bribes and access to Sumiko's private swimming pool, she never really does much to help or hinder her patron.

The ongoing conflict between these two rival gangs is the main thrust of the film's plot, but Terrifying Girls High School has plenty of smaller side plots going on at the same time, several of them at times look like they are going to coalesce into the film's main plot. The most significant of these subplots follows Keiichi Yoshioka, the newest teacher at Seiko Girls High School, who seems to be cast in the same mold as Richard Dadier from Blackboard Jungle (1955). He's an idealistic young teacher who's not afraid to stand up to the thugs and malcontents that he's been charged with teaching and has no patience for the apathy and impotence of his peers. Where he differs from Dadier is that he thinks the best way to reach these kids is to beat the shit out of them. So when the girls disrupt his classroom by pelting him with their underwear or staging an impromptu striptease, Keiichi doesn't hesitate to smack some sense into them. He even manages to break up a gang fight at one point by suplexing both gangs into submission, one delinquent at a time.

All of this naturally draws the ire of Michiko, who calls in some of her friends from the Yakuza to teach Keiichi a lesson. They ambush him and his fiancée, and then gang rape her while Michiko holds Keiichi at knife-point and forces him to watch. The ordeal is bizarrely interrupted by Yuki, who appears out of nowhere and ritually challenges Michiko to a duel, which Michiko is honor-bound to accept. Already, this is a bit weird because none of the delinquents have been using these kinds of strict formalities before, quite the opposite in fact, as the brawls we have seen between the rival girl gangs are full of all sorts of hair-pulling, ambushes, and other assorted dirty tricks. Indeed, after Yuki and Michiko have concluded their extremely formal duel, which ends in a tie, we will never see anything like this again for the rest of the movie. Even stranger is the fact that I have no idea what happened to Keiichi or his fiancée after this, because the film just cuts directly to Michiko and Yuki's duel, and neither Keiichi nor his fiancée appears again in the movie. It's such a bizarre non-sequitur ending for a character who I thought was going to be the film's protagonist.

Instead, Yuki is the closest thing we have to a protagonist character in this ensemble, which is why the fact that her motivation remains unspoken until the end, and that it contradicts all her previously established behavior, is so mystifying. We will learn that she wants revenge on the son of the school president: Takeo. Apparently, the guy murdered her entire family sometime before the events of the film, though it is unclear what he would stand to gain from doing something like that. However, she doesn't bother to make a move against Takeo until after he has seduced, impregnated, and abandoned her friend Yoko (one of the few non-delinquents attending Seiko Girls High School). Surely, Takeo's mistreatment of Yoko was sufficient motivation for Yuki go after him, it also has the benefit of making sense chronologically, as Yuki only targets after Takeo right after a distraught Yoko commits suicide (this sequence is, incidentally, the most aesthetically interesting moment in the film as Yoko drifts through the clouds peacefully on the way to her ultimate doom). As it stands, there's no reason why Yuki didn't immediately track down Takeo after coming to Seiko Girls' High School.

However, Yuki's sudden reveal of having a motivation that completely contradicts her behavior up to this point is only the start of the ending's weirdness. The film also decides to promote Michiko, the cat-killing psychopath whose last plot-critical action was having her Yakuza goons rape a woman while she held her fiance at knife-point and forced him to watch, to the role of heroic figure. This was a bit too much moral whiplash for me to handle. Like sure, Takeo is definitely a bad guy who deserves whatever cruel fate the film chooses to inflict on him, but Michiko has been portrayed throughout the film as an absolute monster, and not only does she not get any comeuppance the film ends with her standing in a defiant pose staring down the audience, having rejected an unjust society completely by burning her sailor fuku (exposing her tits one more time in the process because that is the kind of movie this is).

The already confusing narrative is further complicated by scenes that come out of nowhere and are never mentioned again. What was the point of the scene where Meiko, one of Michiko's underlings, goes after school to the teacher's lounge and seduces a teacher in exchange for a better grade on her next test? This scene serves no purpose other than to get the actress's tits out for a couple more minutes, though even this is a dubious purpose, as this is not the first time the audience will see her naked nor the last time either.

Watching Terrifying Girls High School: Women's Violent Classroom is a unique experience because every time you think you have gotten the hang of what is going on, who these characters are, and where the plot is going, the film will throw you another curve-ball. You can never be sure if the scene you're watching is critical to the plot or just a set-piece that the filmmakers thought would be cool to add to the film. I found writing this review to be a challenge because so much happens in this film, but very little of it has any bearing on anything else. How the hell do you do a plot summary on a film like this? That said, while the narrative is a bit sloppy, the film does succeed in creating a portal into another world distinct from our own. It's a nasty, sleazy world, no doubt, where schoolgirls threaten each other at knife-point and force each other into degrading sexual acts, all while jazzy music plays in the background.