Heavily influenced by the stunning films of Shunya Ito's Female Prisoner cycle of the early 70s, Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs is a minor exploitation masterpiece which is, almost criminally, currently available only in a Japanese language version.
Agent Zero (Miki Sugimoto) is sent undercover to infiltrate a violent gang, responsible for the kidnap of a rich Industrialist's daughter. Out of this unoriginal premise Yukio Noda fashions ninety minutes of the most delightful cinematic bedlam. The proceedings are chock full of action, nudity and violence, with beautiful bright red blood spurting in massive geysers from almost every part of the human body in a series of shotgun deaths and vicious knifings. Characters are tortured, strangled, burnt alive, bottled and violently dispatched by Agent Zero's titular Red Handcuffs weapon. One victim simultaneously has his hand crushed in a metallic vice, his mouth stuffed with a high power water jet and his body burnt to cinders with a blow torch. This is a film imbued with an unrestrained spirit of total excess and it is ferociously entertaining.
