They seem like nice kids at first. Smiling. Laughing. Cartwheeling. Enjoying their youth. Riding around in a Jeep in search of fun fun fun in the sun sun sun, all to the tune of some swingin’ acid rock.
Gradually though, piece by piece, we learn that NOPE, they’re a gang of crooks who call themselves The Pelican Club. Four guys, one girl. In between goofing off, they steal from anyone they can and they like guns. They also have enemies in a rival gang who will walk right up to you on the street and stab you in the gut.
This is the second installment in the “Stray Cat Rock” series of low-budget Japanese juvenile delinquent films. Each film is a standalone and features a recurring cast who don’t play the same parts (it’s not unusual for most of the characters to end up dead by the end of the movie). It’s not an ongoing saga or a universe; “Stray Cat Rock” is an aesthetic. In them, you get lots of crime in Tokyo, heavy guitar rock, heavy counterculture vibes, even heavier American pulp influences, and fetching genre queen Meiko Kaji up to no good.
This is the one in which our gang of ne’er-do-wells get involved in a heist job. It all starts when they shoot out a rich girl’s tires and then stop and help her in hopes that she might want to be their leader’s girlfriend (meanwhile, she thinks that she merely had a blow-out on the road). And it works! Turns out that she’s also the mistress of the leader of a wacky religious group, of whom she’s so resentful that she spills all of the details to our Pelicans about how they can rob them of 30 million yen. She doesn’t even want any of the money. She just wants to cause trouble, bless her heart.
Like all of the “Stray Cat Rock” flicks, this one zips along fast. Total run time: 84 minutes. It was rushed into production and came out mere months after the first film, Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss. So, it’s not a slick piece of work, but a story like this benefits from rough edges. The little style moves from director Toshiya Fujita (who later directed Kaji in Lady Snowblood), such as a quick scene of gang rivalry that’s punctuated with comic strip images, put it over the top. It’s an outlaw film that feels like it was made by outlaws.