Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom (

1973

)

Another day, another contender for the coveted title of “Worst High School in 1970s Japan.” Our candidate today is the inaptly titled “School of Hope,” a charitable institution that takes in the worst delinquents the nation has to offer, and tries to shape them into decent young ladies. As you would imagine, keeping a school crammed full of violent thugs, gangsters, and psychos running is a tough business, but the administration at School of Hope has created a unique model for maintaining order. They have recruited the worst psychos in the student body and organized them into a Disciplinary Committee, giving them free rein to harass and torture the other students as they please, effectively terrifying the rest of the school into behaving.

Indeed, the film opens with the Disciplinary Committee hard at work breaking an especially troublesome student, one Michiyo Akiyama. They lock her up in an unused science lab, rip off her shirt (mostly because we can't expect the audience to wait until after the opening credits to see some tits), and begin an exsanguination torture. Oddly enough, the Disciplinary Committee is not trying to kill Michiyo; indeed, they are under strict orders from the Vice Principal to keep her alive, as while the school has sufficient influence to cover up a few murders, it's still bad business for JKs to turn up dead. Yoko, the leader of the Disciplinary Committee, tells Michiyo that when a large chemistry flask fills with blood, she will have lost 1/3 of her blood and she will promptly die, but behind the scenes, some of Yoko's minions are also pumping extra blood into the flask. Their goal after all is to demoralize and terrify Michiyo, not kill her.

The only problem is that Michiyo is the type who prefers to die on her feet, so when it looks like she's running out of blood, she breaks free of her restraints and makes a break for it, smashing her way through the Disciplinary Committee in the process. The delinquent bolts for the rooftop when she continues to fight back until she is almost knocked off the edge of the roof, and is left holding onto the railing desperately. Although the Disciplinary Committee thugs were not trying to kill Michiyo before, the girl's insolence has drawn their ire, and so they kick her until she is forced to let go and plummet to the ground below. This, incidentally, is the problem with leaving your enforcement to a band of barely controlled psychopaths. They may be effective at scaring the rest of the girls into line, but they have a bad habit of acting erratically themselves.

As I said, the death of one troublesome girl is not that big an issue for the School of Hope, as the Vice Principal commands an almost comical degree of respect and power in the community. He's the kind of guy who goes out drinking and whoring with the Police Chief and the Mayor on the weekends, and maintains good ties with the local Yakuza family as well. In addition to his duties at the school, he also finds time to run seedy nightclubs and other scummy criminal enterprises. It feels absurd that a school administrator should wield this much power, but I suppose that he captures the degree of power that school administrators seem to wield in their students' imaginations if nothing else. Logically, it's absurd, but there is a certain degree of emotional resonance here that makes it compelling.

If the Vice Principal is a child's view of adult power, then the Principal is a child's view of adult foolishness. He speaks in a ridiculous warbling voice about the moral importance of his role as an educator, and how proud he is to be shaping these rough young women into dutiful wives and loving mothers. Moreover, he is not some snake-tongued hypocrite; he gives every indication of believing everything he says and being completely ignorant of the fact that the school he runs probably violates the Geneva Convention. His only real hypocrisy is a deeply repressed desire to screw his adolescent charges, but I'm inclined to give him a pass on that, as he never acts on the urge until a gang of female delinquents corners him and practically force themselves on him. It's honestly a bit touching when, after news of his sexual dalliance comes to light, the doddering old fool takes one last stroll through the hallways while his former students sing a song (I assume it's traditional) thanking him for being their teacher.

At the film's start, the Disciplinary Committee and the Vice Principal seem to have the School of Hope firmly in hand, with even the most troublesome students being cowed into submission by threat of torture. All this is about to change, though, with the arrival of three new transfer students: Remi Kitano, Kyoko Kubo, and Noriko Kazam. We are introduced to all three girls by seeing the crimes they committed that landed them in the School of Hope in the first place, which is an efficient way to establish that Remi is a hothead who uses her switchblade at the slightest provocation, Kyoko is a slut who indifferently jerks off truck drivers in exchange for rides, and Noriko is the type delinquent who steals a car and then starts a fight with the owner when he tries to stop her. Additionally, we quickly learn that Noriko was friends with Michiyo; indeed, the poor murdered girl was once her lieutenant. Noriko doesn't buy the story about Michiyo's death being an accident, and neither do any of the other girls at the School of Hope. Together with the other transfer girls and a couple of veteran School of Hope students, Noriko forms a gang and looks for evidence about what happened to Michiyo with the long-term goal of bringing the whole school down around the ears of the Vice Principal and the Disciplinary Committee.

Step one is getting information; fortunately, Toshie, one of the members of the Disciplinary Committee, is a lesbian and is quite smitten with Kyoko. Even better, Kyoko is up for the occasional same-sex dalliance as well (she tells Toshie that she uses men just to wash the taste out of her mouth). So naturally, because this is a degenerate movie, Kyoko corners Toshie in the bathroom and seduces her, with Toshie putting up only token resistance before giving in to the delinquent's charms. It is quite the love scene, indeed. I can't remember the last time I saw a lesbian sex scene so fetishized that it included a close-up of the two girls' nipples crossing! In short order, Toshie spills her guts, and Noriko and her gang have everything they need to bring the fight to the Disciplinary Committee.

The Disciplinary Committee isn't going to take Noriko's challenge lying down; instead, they start to increase their reign of terror with fresh rounds of horrific torture inflicted on Noriko and her associates. The electrocution, a trick Yoko picked up from the Americans in Vietnam, is relatively tame, even though the Disciplinary Committee attaches one electrode to their victim's breasts and another to their genitals to make the ordeal as degenerate as possible. Far more disturbing is the omorashi torture sequence, for those readers who still have a chance of seeing heaven, omorashi is where the victim is force fed a huge amount of water and then not allowed to go to the bathroom, ending with the victim wetting themselves, which happens here in the middle of class. Why the girl didn't piss herself in-between classes (as we see her sitting in the room that is empty aside from the Disciplinary Committee keeping watch over her) and save herself the public embarrassment is beyond me.

It should be easy to mix up the first two entries of the Terrifying Girls High School series. They share the same director, many of the same actors (several of whom are playing very similar characters), nearly identical costumes, a similar setup, the rough outlines of a plot, and a similar jazzy soundtrack. However, the general feel of the two movies couldn't be more different. Terrifying Girls' High School: Women's Violent Classroom (1972) was a film where you went into each new scene with a kind of breathless suspense over what would happen next, not because the events of the film were particularly tense or because you had a deep investment in the characters, but because the plot steadfastly refused to follow any rhyme or reason. Lynch Law Classroom, on the other hand, has a smaller cast and a much more focused plot. We know that Noriko is going to fight with the Disciplinary Committee and the school administrators and eventually overcome, kill, or humiliate them. This much is clear almost from the very start. It's not that there are no surprises to be had here, I certainly wasn't expecting the omorashi torture sequence, but there are not any mystifying moments where the audience is left wondering “what is this movie about and which characters am I supposed to root for.” The only case where a plot line is established and then discarded without any further development is when it's revealed that Yoko and the Vice Principal are having an affair, which seems tame compared to the way Women's Violent Classroom would conjure up and discard plot lines willy-nilly.

That said, the plot could have stood to be a little more focused in some areas. In particular, the character of the mysterious blackmailer who looks like he stepped out of a Seijun Suzuki noir film seems superfluous. He doesn't really do much except stand around, look cool, and steal some of the girls' thunder. This is a delinquent girls movie; there's not much need for them to have a male adult accomplice. Indeed, his presence detracts somewhat from the fantasy of independent youths matching wits with an entirely hostile adult world.

I suspect that at least part of the reason for Lynch Law Classroom's relative clarity when compared to Women's Violent Classroom is that director Norifumi Suzuki was using the previous film as a rough draft. The film has many of the same ideas and character archetypes, but everything is put together a little more cleanly and comprehensibly in the sequel. Certainly, the student revolution scene at the end works better than the similar one at the end of Women's Violent Classroom, partially because Miki Sugimoto's character here is just a delinquent and not a psychopath, but also because it is expanded out into a general uprising of students who tear the entire school apart. It feels more like an act of deliberate rebellion, instead of just one more psychotic action by a psychotic character. It also acts as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for any youngsters who snuck into the audience (presumably with fake IDs), as there is no juvenile fantasy as common or alluring as the notion of literally tearing your school apart. Still, would it be too much to ask to have the riotous schoolgirls burn their sailor fuku and fight off the riot cops in their underwear? That symbolism worked rather well in the first movie, and it's not like Lynch Law Classroom has been especially prudish up to this point.

This results in a movie that is probably better (and certainly easier to understand) than its predecessor, but is on the whole a less enjoyable experience as a result. Though it's not like the film is totally free of internal tension. Much of the film has the atmosphere of a juvenile fantasy. Consider how the vice principal is not just an authority figure who can give you detention, he is an all-powerful overlord who has the mayor and chief of police at his beck and call. This isn't realistic, but it approximates how much power said administrator wields in the imagination of his young charges. Likewise, the school of Hope, being essentially a woman's prison right out of Chained Heat (1983) or Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion (1972), is absurd on the surface but fits well with juvenile imagination. Who among us can say they never compared their high school to Alcatraz or Rikers Island? Indeed, the climactic revolution where the girls smash up their school can probably trace its roots to a passing fantasy one of the filmmakers had while bored in class.

This is all well and good, but this naive fantasy clashes with the more bizarre and fetishistic violence (in particular the omorashi sequence). It's not that you can't have sex in a movie like this; indeed, sexuality is a pretty core component of any adolescent fantasy. The problem is that these are very clearly the fantasies of middle-aged perverts, not their high school counterparts. Were the sex scenes to match the rest of the film's tone, they would no doubt be softer and gentler, with the Disciplinary Committee handing out a lot more spankings and a lot fewer electrocutions/bloodlettings. Indeed, only Kyoko's seduction of Toshie feels like a proper youthful fantasy, and even then, it should have happened in the shower and not the toilet!