Movie Review: Female Teacher: Dirty Afternoon (1981, Impulse Pictures)

Directed by Kichitaro Negishi
Starring Eri Kanuma, Yuki Kazamatsuri and Yuusuke Koike
Run Time: 68 minutes

A teacher, Sakiko Kurata, receives a phone call regarding one of her former students. Young Sueko is accused of being a prostitute and has requested Sakiko’s help. This little minx seduces strangers for sex, but does it for the sheer fun of it, no money required. Sakiko has moved to another town and barely remembers Sueku, but there is something about her that awakens painful memories of her own secretive past. What is that strange paint thinner smell on Sueko? Who is the man in the nylon mask that violently assaulted Sakiko many years ago? In her search for answers, Sakiko discovers that her past may have inadvertently destroyed another families future.

Female Teacher is number 8 in the Nikkatsu Erotic Films Collection and is billed as one of the best, and most controversial in the film series. For myself, I just didn't see it that way. What I sort of expected going into it was some hot “Lusty School Mistress” type of pink-film, but the way the story plays out, it is more like a soap-opera style plot, with the teacher being raped in the past, mistakenly accusing the wrong man and then trying to set things right for him after his life has been ruined. There is also a sub-plot involving the accused man's daughter, who is a former student of the teacher, a girl who has boring sex with strangers.

Not really anything that I was able to get excited about here, as the sex scenes were really uninspired, and were mostly of the variety where one of the two people involved looked like they would rather be doing the dishes or ironing clothes as opposed to doing the deed. In other words, it lacked any type of fun-factor, and seemed to be trying a little too hard to be a serious drama. And the title is a bit misleading, as there are no real teacher/student scenarios involved, just stale sex scenes, mostly under bad lighting. I kept waiting for it to pick up and give me something to like about it, but that just never happened. Which is unfortunate because the girls in this particular film are quite attractive, but the attempts at creating any type of erotic situation seemed to be doomed from the start because of how dull the story-line was that they were trying to be fit into.

Compared to the other films in this series that I’ve seen, Female Teacher falls short of the rest on just about every level and is easily my least favorite of the bunch.

EXTRAS-
* Newly translated English subtitles
* Original theatrical trailer
* Liner Notes from Japanese film scholar Jasper Sharp