Female Teacher: Hunting (1982)

Studio: Impulse

Theatrical Release: August 28th, 1982

DVD Release: May 7th, 2013

Rating: UnRated

Directed by Junichi Suzuki

Review by Craig Sorensen

The third entry in the “Female Teacher” series released by Impulse, Female Teacher: Hunting continues the sleazy, depressing rape exploitation started with Female Teacher:  Dirty Afternoon and Female Teacher: In Front of the Students.  Out of all of the films in Impulse’s Nikkatsu sex film series, the Female Teacher series is my least favorite.  Compared to other films in the series, they just feel drab.  They seem to forgo the looney heights of depravity that make these films worth seeing in favor of serious minded rape dramas.  And they seem to be saying some very, um, not very nice things about the women at the center of these rape plays.  I guess I’ll get to that wonderful subject in a minute.

Female Teacher: Hunting starts fine enough with two high school students, Midori (Kyoko Ito) and Kuriyama (Hajime Ishigami), skinny dipping at the school pool after hours.  Some hidden creep steals Midori’s school uniform and runs off.  We then cut to the last day of school and someone at the school has anonymously accused Kuriyama of raping Midori.  Kuriyama doesn’t like being wrongfully accused of rape (who does) so he decides to drop out of school.  First he has a tense confrontation with one of his teachers (a FEMALE TEACHER), Miss Shimako (Yuki Kazamatsuri), who lead the charge against him when the wrongful accusations were made.  Of course he ends up throwing her to the ground and threatening to rape her.  That’ll show her.  He also stops by to see Midori.  She never came forward to deny the rape claims.  Kuriyama forces himself on her for good measure.  And of course, this being a Japanese film, she enjoys it.  There are more sexual assaults that follow and lots of yelling and moping about.  It’s all taken very seriously without much in the way of levity.

The film is well made, of course, like all in the Nikkatsu series.  All the actors give good performances (Kazamatsuri is great in both this and Female Teacher: Dirty Afternoon) and it’s shot very well.  All the films in the Female Teacher series seem to be less colorful than the other films by Nikkatsu.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it certainly fits the more serious content of the films, it’s just that that’s one of the things that I look forward to in these.  I want the complete lunacy, the utter disdain for good taste that something like True Story of a Woman In Jail offers.  Without that there’s not a lot to draw me in.  Add to that that these films just feel so so sleazy.  I mean, of course True Story of a Woman In Jail is sleazy but it seems so far removed from reality that it can be fun.  Also, it doesn’t have such a disturbing subtext.  See, in all the Female Teacher films thus far, the main female protagonist is brutally punished for falsely accusing someone of rape.  And, of course, they always end up enjoying it.  It fills a void in their lonely lives.  Because they wouldn’t be accusing people of rape if they were getting laid I guess.  I mean, for fuck’s sake, Miss Shimako doesn’t really seem happy in this film until she’s brutally raped near the end of the film.  Of course, when it’s done she stands up and walks away with a huge grin on her face.  The all-women-want-it theme of the series is very off putting and makes the films hard to recommend.

 

Like all the films in Impulse’s Nikkatsu series, Female Teacher: Hunting looks great.  The detail and color of the transfer are up to their usual standards.  Again you get good liner notes from Jasper Sharp and a trailer.

[Rating: 2 stars]