Pink Cut & Top Stripper

Details

This special limited edition slipcover is limited to 1,000 units and is only available on our website and at select indie retailers. Absolutely no major retailers will be stocking them.

Named after Yasujiro Ozu’s custom-made, tatami-level, crab-like tripod, Kani is a new home video label dedicated to leveling the gaze and furthering the understanding of Asian cinema in North America. Focused on genre-defying films, Kani aims to expand the canon, bolster up-and-coming filmmakers and reintroduce repertory classics in context. Vinegar Syndrome’s sister company, OCN Distribution, is thrilled to be representing this diverse and unique home video line!

Before The Family Game redefined the Japanese cinema of the 1980s, Yoshimitsu Morita cut his teeth on two remarkable erotic films for Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno line: Top Stripper (1982) and Pink Cut: Love Me Hard, Love Me Deep (1983). Marked by an atypically sweet, sex-positive tone and an infectious pop sensibility that stands out amongst the more tortured classics of the genre, both films find the independent filmmaker working with studio resources for the first time and therefore experimenting with various new modes of filmmaking.

Top Stripper follows Yoichi (Kensuke Miyawaki), a bright-eyed delivery boy who misguidedly falls in love with the stripper next door, Gloria (Kaori Okamoto). Shot on-location in a near-documentary style that forefronts delightful bygone locations and the camaraderie inherent to the strip club’s troupe, the film hits a surprising note of coming-of-age, suffused with open-ended questions about spectatorship that prove critical of the medium itself. Its pop-inflected counterpart, Pink Cut: Love Me Hard, Love Me Deep, sees Morita working on a set for the first time, basking in the artificiality of it all. Morita goes as far as staging musical numbers, in a fantasmatic tale of entrepreneurship that finds Mami (Mayumi Terashima) and Yuka (Mai Inoue) open a barbershop best known for its… special services. A pure candy-colored concoction emblematic of the 1980s, it reveals Morita as a thoroughly versatile filmmaker that here takes his first steps towards the striking, playful postmodernism that would define his entire oeuvre.

directed by: Yoshimitsu Morita
starring: Kaori Okamoto, Ken Miyawaki, Nami Misaki, Ayako Ota, Jun Ueno, Yudo Yoshikawa, Akio Kaneda
1982, 1983 / 130 min (combined) / 1.85:1 / Japanese DTS-HD MA 2.0

Additional info:

• Region A Blu-ray
• High Definition presentation
• Interview with producer Kazuko Misawa on Yoshimitsu Morita (2025)
• Kazuko Misawa introduces Top Stripper (2026)
• Kazuko Misawa introduces Top Stripper
• Booklet with on-set photographs and new writing from Aaron Gerow
• New art from Seosie Kim
• English, English SDH subtitles