"Welcome! This is the Pleasure Dungeon! Would you like sadism, masochism, costume play or a scat job?" So begins S&M HUNTER, the 1985 pink film from Japan starring Shiro Shimomoto as a bondage superhero out to settle the score with a sadistic, femdom girl gang called The Bombers. Tasteless, cartoony and over-the-top it's a rootin' tootin' horndog adventure that John Waters would have been proud to make, and it's one of the first pink film DVDs out from Pink Eiga, a brand new DVD distributor in the US unleashing Japanese pink films on an unsuspecting public.

Pink films aren't porn, and they also aren't roman pornos. So what are they? Jasper Sharp offers a blunt definition in the Japan Times:

"Pink films are softcore sex movies shot on 35-mm film, as opposed to video, and intended primarily for screening on rolling triple bills in specialist adult theaters."

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Running about 60 minutes each, usually shot on 35mm, edited on flatbed editing tables (not digital non-linear systems) and with their sound mixed analog, rather than digitally, pink films are the last hold-out for low budget 35mm filmmaking. Starting around 1963, they were low budget audience bait, luring patrons from big budget star vehicles with their promise of skin. Directors are typically given US$10,000 to make a pink film, the days in the shooting schedules can be counted on one hand, and after paying off production costs, whatever is left over from the $10,000 counts as the director's salary. Within those constraints, the sky's the limit. Artistic expression is free and easy in pink films, and the folks financing them could care less about their content, as long as there's sex.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa got his start in pink films, film festival fave Ryuichi Hiroki is a pink film director and his movies like VIBRATOR and I AM AN S&M WRITER are made according to pink film boilerplate (limited locations, low budget, a handful of actors, softcore sex). Even today, around 100 pink films are produced each year in Japan (roughly 1/3 of all Japanese movies produced each year). Mitsuru Meiki's pink film, THE GLAMOROUS LIFE OF SACHIKO HANAI, starring George W. Bush's finger and North Korean terrorists, even got a US theatrical release back in 2003 from Palm Pictures.�

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Now, into one of the worst DVD markets of the last 10 years, comes Pink Eiga, a labor of love by Nadav Streett, Ayumu Oda and Chris B. who work together at the post-production facility, The Post Office. They had all watched a few pink films and fell in love with the movies' senses of humor, and also the way some directors took their projects in unexpected directions: Ayumu actually cried while watching BLIND LOVE by Daisuke Goto (more on that later - the movie, not the crying). So the first thing they did was approach Shin Toho and Kokuei, two of Japan's biggest producers of pink films, and they had a rough time of it. "It wasn't easy to convince them," Nadav says. "First of all, some attempts had been made to reach out to them in the past, but they weren't very serious ones. That fact alone had their guard up and they were very suspicious of our motives and seriousness."�

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Eventually, Team Pink Eiga convinced them to sign contracts and supply materials, but then they hit their second major obstacle: America's puritanical laws about porn. Much is written about puritanical American and most of it is belly aching over nothing, but listening to what Pink Eiga went through to get their films released here is nothing short of hair raising.

Step one: compliance with USC 18 2257 a law that requires the distributor of sex films to maintain IDs for every single performer in the films in order to verify their age if necessary. Call it "the Traci Lords" law, if you will, and Pink Eiga were horrified to find that it applied to them. Shintoho and Kokuei were shocked to get a request for copies of ID cards for actors in their films - even ones made in 1985 - but they stepped up admirably. The problems were compounded by the fact that many Japanese folks involved in these movies didn't have passports so there was some back-and-forth over what kind of IDs would meet the law in the US. Nadav says, "We've had to round up IDs for everybody who is in our films after, so I think we have a good pile by now. Luckily, most male lead actors participate in many films, so as soon as you get their ID once, you're covered for a large amount of titles." Female actors - not so easy.

Then, age verification in hand, they opened an account with a replication house and sent out their materials, and their problems really began.

"We initially set a release date of November 1st for our discs, and had everything ready for S&M HUNTER and NEW TOKYO DECADENCE: THE SLAVE around 2 weeks earlier," Nadav says. "We researched various replication houses, sent out masters, waited in vain, and got denied each time." Ultimately, they would go to four different replication houses and be turned away each time due to the sexual content of the films.

"I remember how disappointed we were to hear their excuses every time, not to mention the fact that we paid for the shipping, the print materials, the time wasted in setting up the account and getting their deliverables prepared, which vary greatly from vendor to vendor, of course, not to mention the money they charged for creating a glass master for replication (non-refundable) and the cost of shipping. At the end of it all, we bit the bullet and called replication houses from the 'back of the book,' and our first question was, 'Do you replicate porn DVDs?' We were all very displeased to have to do that, but it was the only way to ensure that we weren't wasting our time."

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And that wasn't the end of their problems, because with each title they want to release, they have to jump through hoops to make sure that the content passes muster, even though pink films are softcore, not hard. Take Daisuke Goto's BLIND LOVE, for example. "We still need to take it to our porn lawyer to find out if it's kosher," Nadav says. "The very last scene in the film is a 'flash forward' where the female lead is telling her 5 year old daughter about her fathers' passing. Oy vey, a kid in an erotic film, despite the fact that the scene is totally 'clean'."

�So now that the first two Pink Eiga titles are coming out this week (Tuesday, in fact - January 14th, the day that Nadav's wife is giving birth to their second child) do they have a different idea about how long it takes to get these discs on the street? And what will the schedule be moving forward?

"Since the whole project is independently financed - read: Nadav and Chris are coughing up for everything," says Nadav, "We couldn't simply take one of the films to a translation/subtitle house and get them done, since the fees they charge make the whole endeavor not worthwhile. This isn't IRON MAN we're� talking about here - we don't anticipate an incredible volume of sales, and therefore have to keep the costs as low as possible. Since we do it all in-house we accept language limitations and interns with learning curves as par for the course. It takes about 1.5 months to create one title (with a DVD menu, box art and full author), but since we have several translators working at the same time, and the English verification is getting faster, we did 50 subtitled versions in a year. Getting those on the streets is a different matter entirely. I really thought we could do each title from top to bottom in 2 weeks, but I was dumb."

He goes on, "The down side of the whole endeavor is that we really get to see a different, perhaps uglier side of something that we all love. At Pink Eiga, we're all filmmakers - editors, directors, script writers and so on - and all of us have been doing this for a while on the creative side. Jumping into the shark-infested water of distribution has taught us a couple of painful lessons about the film world."

On the other hand, they owe a lot to their Japanese licensees.

"The Japanese have been extremely patient with us - we've been at this for close to 2 years and they haven't been seeing too many results. We've been asking them for their posters, press releases, actor IDs and tapes for screenings, and they haven't seen much of a return. We really owe everything to them, and their taking a chance on us as their international window of distribution," says Nadav.

It's pretty impressive to see a Japanese distributor be this patient, and we can only hope that their patience is rewarded. So pay heed: Pink Eiga! S&M HUNTER! NEW TOKYO DECADENCE: THE SLAVE! Lots of pink films coming up! Which are sex movies that you don't have to feel ashamed to watch with a friend! The pink film tornado starts today!

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(More on pink films)

(Trailer for S&M HUNTER)

(Trailer for NEW TOKYO DECADENCE: THE SLAVE)

(Pink Eiga official site)

(Lots of Pink Eiga trailers)

(Jasper Sharp's book on pink films)

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