NOTE: Both films have the same technical specs.

Impulse Pictures / NTSC Region 1 / Unrated / 2.35:1 widescreen / 2.0 Japanese mono / ENLGISH subtitles / 69 minutes / BUY G-STRING FESTIVAL and DIRTY AFTERNOON FROM TLACULT

Extras: Liner notes from Japanese film scholar Jasper Sharp

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Impulse Pictures‘ “Nikkatsu Erotic Film Collection” is turning out to be one of the best series since, well, Impulse’s “Schoolgirl Report” movies. The first six films in the library have ranged from the fantastically sleazy True Story of a Woman in Jail sub-series to horrific Zoom films. With volumes 7 & 8, Impulse has switched it up entirely with the first in the Nympho Diver (a goofy, light-hearted sex romp) and Female Teacher (a dour, debauched drama) sub-series. Both disks feature a beautiful 2.35:1 widescreen transfer, clear and even 2.0 Japanese soundtrack and informative and very interesting liner notes about each film by Japanese film scholar and film curator, Jasper Sharp.

Nympho Diver: G-String Festival (1981) continues a 20+ year Japanese tradition of celebrating the “Girl Diver” genre in which women and girls from small, rural villages dive for abalone, pearls and yes, clams. Nympho Diver takes the genre to the next level in another Japanese institution, the Nikkatsu Films roman porno. G-String Festival begins with a lone (and past her prime) diver “girl” and the mayor and his son trying to come up with a way to draw people to their small town to spend money. They decide that hiring some young, attractive girls to do the clam diving and having a, you guessed it, G-String Festival may just bring in some moolah. Of course when you bring in a group of hot chicks there is going to be some sexy shenanigans and drama that follows, and both do, in spades.

Baby like!

G-String Festival was a lot of fun to watch and for a silly sex comedy, it was pretty well done. Barely a scene goes by that doesn’t involve nudity, sex, innuendo or a giant sculpture of a penis and vagina, which coincidentally fit right together. Not even the village priest is able to stay away from the sexy silliness as he beds the one new diver girl who is, *GASP*, a virgin! But not for long. One of the staples of the “Girl Diver” genre is beautiful underwater photography but because of budget restraints, we are instead treated to a bikini clad cat fight where the dude trying to break it up ends up getting held down and jerked off by the ferocious females! Aside from a small touch of melodrama concerning a love triangle, most of G-String Festival is a celebration of the carefree and fun parts of sex.

Female Teacher: Dirty Afternoon, on the other hand, is the kind of movie that by the end you want to just lie down and contemplate the virtues of having sex at all. That is not to say that it’s bad or not entertaining, on the contrary, it’s a very well written and performed film loaded with filthy, sleazy sex. But it is a flip-side to the diver movie. A young girl (like 15-16 though she looks 13), Sueko calls Sakiko, her teacher, after she is arrested for suspicion of prostitution even though she never charged any money. Sakiko comes and picks her up and soon suspects that her student’s father is a man who she believes brutally raped her in her college days. The slutty Sueko comes from a dysfunctional family where her sister and mother don’t get along and her father is a paint-thinner-huffing homeless man, but is he a rapist? Sakiko will soon learn that she and her student aren’t very different at all.

What’s my favorite number? 69!

Dirty Afternoon takes a little detour from the usual setting of a “naughty teacher” roman porno and uses just the sensei/student relationship as a contrasting parallel of the two female’s lives. By  that I mean that Sakiko (the teacher) is supposed to be setting an example for this poor, little abused girl yet she may be more depraved and emotionally broken than Sueko. The fact that the actress playing the student looks so very young makes it more than a little uncomfortable when she has sex scenes. She literally looks like she could be well underage but I suppose that’s what director Kichitaro Negishi was going for. Everything about the sexual relationships in this movie was perverse in some way; Sakiko could only connect with men through sex, Sueko would have sex with random men and even Mama-san was getting bent over in the back of the grocery store to get a promotion. The sub-title Dirty Afternoon was very appropriate since that’s what I had while watching this awesomely sleazy movie.