Last Updated on January 21, 2021 by rob
Alaskan hunter Tetsuya (Tetsuya Watari) returns to Japan to discover that his sister has killed herself after being raped by a gang of hoodlums. After rescuing politician’s daughter Kyoko (Meiko Fujimoto) from a vicious motorcycle gang terrorising the locals around a US airbase he realizes these are the same scum responsible for his sister’s death. When Kyoko is kidnapped and held to ransom by the gang Tetsuya sets out to rescue her using his hunting skills and his huge twin barrelled rifle to bring the thugs to justice.
Demonstrating yet again that when it comes to movie trends Japanese cinema was years ahead of everyone else, this vigilante/rape-revenge flick was made a good five years before Charlie took to the streets in Death Wish, yet it is basically the same thing. Actually better in some respects since the standard cannon fodder villains of this genre are here allowed a poignant ‘fight or flight’ moment in which they reflect on Tetsuya’s imminent arrival. They could run but as one of them says,’What’s the point? We’ve nowhere to go’, and it’s to Hasebe’s credit that the wasteland of derelict buildings, fading Coco-Cola billboards and seedy clubs around the US airbase – whose jets are a persistent echo on the soundtrack – does indeed seem all encompassing. If you’re a fan of this genre then Savage Wolf Pack has a lot going for it.
Tetsuya Watari – somewhat of a Ken Takakura lookalike – is effective playing the decent man roused to vengeance while Mieko Fujimoto as the gang leader’s girlfriend has a blast embarrassing the patrons of a nightclub by dancing topless or getting her rocks off by encouraging the other gang members to rape an American airbase wife while she rides her lover on the bed next to them, brutally slapping him across the face as she does so! At another point Fujimoto’s red leather clad biker babe forces Yuri Yoshioka’s abducted teen (as symbolically clad in white as Fujimoto is in red) to strip naked and though we’re never actually shown a rape it’s pretty clear from Fujimoto’s lascivious ogling what’s going on in her mind. The film is unusually egalitarian in this respect; portraying a female just as forceful and twisted as the fellas. Pleasingly, Yoshioka’s young lass not only helps Tetsuya wreak vengeance in the finale but emerges from the ordeal a stronger person. ‘I want to fight like you’, she tells him, referring to the estranged relationship with her politician father.
The gang itself – five men and one woman – are also not without interest. At first their swaggering posturing manner seems comically exaggerated. The knifeman of the group twirls his blade in an agitated manner that seems laughable rather than threatening. But just as we’ve written him off as a joke he suddenly, shockingly, stabs a policeman to death. In moments like this, or the sight of Fujimoto in a deliriously self-absorbed dance, Hasebe captures something genuinely unsettling. The plotting also offers enough wrinkles along the way to maintain interest, with Tetsuya and the gang crossing paths and sparking minor skirmishes in the first act, then a dark and grim second act in which Yoshioka’s politician’s daughter and Tetsuya end up captured, the former gang-raped, the latter beaten and his trigger hand smashed, before the inevitable escape in the third, a quick bit of love making between hero and heroine (and shot in an unexpectedly impressionistic, non-exploitative manner) climaxing in some seriously bloody vengeance as Tetsuya litters the ground around the gang’s hideout with steal jaw bear traps from his Alaskan hunting days and begins to pick the victims off with his rifle!
Hasebe is shrewd enough to modulate the gore here. He wisely doesn’t throw everything at the viewer in the first scene but holds back the formidable power of Tetsuya’s hunting rifle and the massive damage it can cause (including one graphic shot of a bad guy with his intestines spilling out) until the climax. And although the usual prejudices of this type of populist fare are present – if Japanese youth are behaving like animals it’s all because of the foreigners, i.e., the US airbase – it is at least implied rather than emphatically stated as fact. Somebody really should try and obtain the rights to Savage Wolf Pack for release. I wouldn’t call the film a masterpiece or one of the great vigilante movies but it is good enough and way above average enough that it deserves some proper attention.
