Female Cats

Innocent female doctor Mineko was seduced by Sachiko, an aggressive lesbian, in her younger days. Mineko begins dating a male coworker, and accepts an invitation to a party at the home of a transvestite patient. Sachiko comes out of Mineko's past, enraged with jealousy, and begins tormenting Mineko and her boyfriend.^[2][3]

• Ai Saotome: Mineko Kagami^[4]
• Sachiko Itō: Kotoe Hiratsuka
• Koichi Iwaki: Shari
• Hiroshi Nawa: Tarō Iruka
• Kōji Minakami: Mamoru Iruka
• Akiyoshi Fukae: Takehiko Ōbayashi
• Yoshishige Ōtsuka: Eiko Kanzaki
• Yoshishige Ōtsuka: Akiko Kanzaki
• 美露: Tommy
• Mitsu Senda: Jōji
• Kotomi Aoki: Akane Minakawa
• Mariko Nishina: Hiromi
• Keiichi Satō: Mikami
• Ryūji Katagiri: Abe
• Madoka Sawa: Julie
• Akira Takahashi: Keiji
• Hiromichi Nakahara: Movie star

Female Cats director Shingo Yamashiro was best known as an actor, having debuted in 1957.^[5] He appeared in the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series, and one of his better-known appearance for Western audiences is in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Sweet Home (1989).^[5][6]

In his Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, Jasper Sharp uses Female Cats as an example of the range of themes possible in the Roman Porno genre, calling it an Argento-esque thriller.^[3] In their Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films, the Weissers compliment Yamashiro's direction as the best thing about the film. They write that he, "goes the extra mile to compose many astonishingly good-looking sequences, punctuated by some creatively stylish camerawork."^[2] A lesbian shower sequence between Mineko and Sachiko is singled out for praise. The scene is shot from the shower faucet's point of view, through a spray of water.^[2] However they fault the film's unimaginative script and its "lurid plot".^[2]

Female Cats was released theatrically in Japan on December 23, 1983.^[7] It was released to home video in VHS format in Japan on March 16, 1984, and re-issued on June 22, 1990. It was released as part of the Nikkatsu Roman Porno Series of VHS releases on December 6, 1991.^[8][9][10] It was released on DVD in Japan on December 4, 1998, and re-released on DVD on June 23, 2006, as part of Geneon's fourth wave of Nikkatsu Roman porno series.^[11][12] In this format it was issued in the 4-disc Roman Porno series DVD Box, Vol. 1 on March 7, 2008.^[13] It is currently scheduled to be released in the USA on DVD May 7, 2013, under the title 'She Cat'.