04/06/2026
Great interview with Jasper Sharp in Musique Machine about among other, the Swedish-Japanese Nikkatsu films released on Blu-ray by Klubb Super 8!
”M[m]: One of the more curious turns in the Roman P***o genre was that in the early 70’s Nikkatsu went to Sweden to make six films with a Swedish cast. These films have recently all been reissued by Klubb Super 8- as either a box set or as a standalone Blu-rays, with you supplying commentary tracks for said films. Could you talk a little bit about how/ why this occurred, and how these films were received by both Japanese and Swedish audiences of the time?
Jasper: When originally writing my book, when I lived in Japan, I came across one of these titles through looking at the filmography of one of the directors I was researching on a Japanese movie database. I noticed the label ‘Sweden P***o’ and that all of the cast were clearly non-Japanese European names, spelt out in the katakana phonetic script. It turns out there were six of these films, so I asked someone I knew at Nikkatsu about it, and they didn’t seem familiar with them. They didn’t have screeners, and they’d been out of circulation since their original release, but they did provide me with a poster and some stills for my book.
Years later, Rickard Gramfors of Klubb Super 8 found some of the posters elsewhere when researching his book ‘Do You Believe in Swedish Sin? Swedish Exploitation Film Posters, 1951-1984’, while in the meantime, a Swedish academic I know based in Japan, Johan Nordström, was intrigued by them, having read about them in my book, so did some more legwork liaising with Nikkatsu, and Rickard then organised new HD transfers with Nikkatsu, which then got released to home video in Japan.
So basically, these titles were sort of forgotten both in Japan and in Sweden until Rickard and Johan started doing some really intense research on them - Johann looking through the official production and release documentation Nikkatsu still had, and Rickard doing more on the Swedish side, trying to track down the original cast members there. It’s all a fascinating story. Effectively, the first four are pink films, because they were made by an independent production unit hired by Nikkatsu for some early titles in the Roman P***o line. It was basically a tiny Japanese crew who went out to Sweden, put an ad in a newspaper for wannabe actors, then made these films under the idea they’d never be shown in Sweden. Well, 50 years later, here we are…
The second two Swedish productions were made as Roman P***o, and had bigger budgets, meatier stories and were pretty substantial films – both totally different, with one a sort of home invasion exploitation movie, the other a more arty attempt to channel Bergman. But they are all really fascinating, because they are obviously fantasy scenarios based on how the Japanese imagined sexually liberated Swedes acted in the early 70s. They don’t really feel like European sexploitation films made at the time, nor do they obviously look like how you’d imagine Roman P***o. But to think, if it wasn’t for Rickard, Johan and I, these curios would be lost to history…”
