XX Beautiful Weapon

In combining hard-boiled action with fetishistic sex, Toei set a new template for V-Cinema with this film, which led to a long-running series and countless imitators in the girls-with-guns genre. As a means to disarm her targets, a female assassin kills men right after intercourse.

Working for a shady political fixer, a yakuza hires several retired hitmen to kill a woman, under the condition that they have sex with her before committing the murder. The first, Sakagami, now plays piano in a bar, but the peculiar nature of the job gets him intrigued. Spying on the woman one night, he witnesses how she has sex with a second assassin and kills him just after he climaxes. Sakagami realises there is something fishy, but his growing fascination with the woman makes him throw caution to the wind.

Inspired by the succès de scandale of Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct the previous year, Toei created the XX (“Double X”) series as an update of hard-boiled film noir for the video era. Each entry stars a different actress, with the main sales point being their first-ever on-screen nude scene. With XX, V-Cinema began to cross over into tabloid media culture, as glamour spreads in magazines and steamy photobooks of the stars became a standard part of the films’ promotional campaigns.

– Tom Mes

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•