By the end of the 1970's these 'pinku-eiga' genre films were winding down both in popularity and quality. For an 80's production, "Zoom Up: Graduation Photo" is a well-produced erotic film, featuring every fetish under the sun, set against a story about young girls entering the porno industry. One girl gets talked into posing for a pornographic magazine, books that could apparently be purchased through vending machines on the street! Another girl gets raped by a gang of school boys who are over excited from looking at the magazine, and when she goes to the publishers to show her scorn, she also gets talked into posing for the same magazine. The film is quite graphic and the situations inflicted on the young girls gets depressing, as they are truly being exploited. In typical fashion for this type of film, the girls start to like the sexual violations being inflicted upon them. Beautiful actresses and nice production values make this an interesting film of the genre. I guess by 1983 viewers had seen it all and this might explain for the extra level of perversion that comes from using barely legal aged school girls. On a side note, it is surprising that such graphic magazines were being legally circulated within a country that isn't even allowed to show pubic hair in their films. Apparently it was acceptable to show a girl being vaginally fisted, as long as there was no pubic hair visible? Anyway at the end of the film we see the parents attempting to marry off their daughter into a respectable family. The question being, can she hide her sordid past? In Japan this behavior is enough to destroy any chance for a girl to successfully marry. If the movie focused a bit more on this aspect and a little less on the sex, this would be a classic along the lines of "Tokyo Decadence."
