casiotonenation

The Friday the 13th connection to this film is wildly overstated. This movie takes place at a lake, there's a cabin, and people die. Other than that, there's only really one plot point and one camera shot patterned off of Friday the 13th -- it's pretty far from a remake or a ripoff as a whole. That said, the purported connection got my attention, and that's probably the point. The movie was worth my time, and I fully forgive the marketing ruse.

We follow three bad guys diving for treasure in a remote lake. Barry Prima is one of the strapping young lads -- he was pretty new to film here, but went on to become a ubiquitous presence in Indonesian action cinema. Two lovely young women and a nerdy guy show up to camp out at the lake. The head bad guy tries to nudge them away, but they stay. Stormy weather and mutual attraction draw the two camps together suggestively, but still chaste (to keep the Indonesian censors at bay).

A mysterious third party shows up to complicate matters with a speed boat chase and violence. For good measure, there are campy zombies on hand that made me think of Jean Rollin's Zombie Lake in the best possible way. It's not all schlock, and it's not all serious, either. I enjoyed the tone.

The 2023 release from Terror Vision is a top-notch restoration with excellent cast and crew interviews. Old, badly-cropped VHS of this can finally be retired. It's almost certainly never looked better, excepting (maybe) the premiere.

This appears to have been a brief Skinemax-style series starring Monique Parent and Jay Richardson as partners in a law firm focused on litigating divorce proceedings. Six half-hour episodes (I'm guessing the whole run of the series) have been repackaged as two feature-length movies as:

-- Illegal Affairs (85 min)

*An American She-Wolf In Tokyo An American woman is a rock star who is splitting from her rich, Japanese businessman husband. He wants her to quit the band, and he has a group sex tape of her from before their marriage that he is holding over her. Meanwhile, a 20-year old woman shows up purporting to be Jay Richardson's daughter from a fling long ago.

*Slam Dunk Monique Parent handles the palimony suit between a lesbian couple who split up when one woman cheated on the other with Monique's identical twin sister.

*Emeralds of the Amazon.

A woman is divorcing her husband after discovering he has been selling their homemade cuckold videos all over South America making her an unwitting Argentinian porn star. Meanwhile, two junior partners handle the divorce of a homeless couple pro bono.

--- Brief Affairs / A Brief Affair (79 min)

*Pardon My French A woman convinces a junior partner to marry her French roommate in order to secure the woman's permanent residence. A menage a trois takes place in their Vegas hotel room, and both women report that they are pregnant.

*The Spy Who Came in the Cold A Russian spy worked over an American scientist. Meanwhile, a man is suing for alienation of affection when his once sexually adventurous wife (the stunning Veronica Carothers) turned frigid.

*Sheik Yurbotti Three wives of a sheik file for political asylum in US. Throwaway B-stories about VR sex toy makers and a cheating husband.

--

It's a silly softcore series -- no more, no less. Worth a viewing if you enjoy these particular actors and you find a cheap DVD set with the full cuts of the episodes. Be sure to verify the runtimes and don't bother watching the edited cuts currently available on streaming platforms.

Three pretty young women work as grifters, taking advantage of visitors at the Kyoto International Exhibition. The girls hang out in a bar run by a self-made woman. This woman had come to town just a few years ago with nothing but her boyfriend and a dream. Her boyfriend became an assistant manager at a grocery store while she worked her way up to owning the bar.

The girls start trapping and pimping local girls to make money. This includes a rape scene in the back of a taxi that is played for laughs that is profoundly disturbing, but sadly, it's not all that out of the ordinary in Japanese exploitation films of this era -- I digress.

Alas, the girls run afoul of the gangsters in town, and need to flee. The girls discover that the barkeep's boyfriend has been two-timing her, and hijinks ensue.

You might call this a proto-pinky girl-gang movie. The filmmakers didn't quite know how to commit at least somewhat to serious drama, comedy, or to the sex and violence. This film fell short for me, but thankfully, the genre as a whole found its footing in the next couple years. Junko Natsu appears as one of the girls, but she bears little resemblance here to the adorable protagonist in the Girls' School (Joshi gakuen) series which came out right around the same time. This film is not without some charm, but don't make this one your first stop on a deep dive.