turned out the first two "Violent Pink" films, Rape! and Assault! Jack the Ripper. Due to the box-office success of these films, Nikkatsu assigned him more work in the genre. The third in Hasebe's "Violent Pink" films, Rape! 13th Hour has a reputation as the most extreme of the series. Nervous about the film's graphic violence, Nikkatsu re-edited it before giving it a theatrical release. Nevertheless, the Weissers write that the released version is "graphically disturbing", "incredibly savage", "offensively appalling", and that it was "long-considered the most offensive, the most grotesque movie of all time." Hasebe later recalled with amusement that the studio had made a mistake in assigning producer Itō to watch over him, as this most extreme of their trio of "Violent Pink" films was Itō's favorite. In spite of the film's box-office success, it became highly controversial with the public and with critics. The controversy surrounding the film was similar to that in the U.S. following the release of I Spit on Your Grave a year later in 1978. Because of the outcry over the film, Nikkatsu ordered that the extreme violence in future "Violent Pink" films be curtailed. Two years later, the successful release of Kōyū Ohara's Zoom Up: Rape Site, late in 1979, returned the genre to Hasebe's original "ultra-violent" vision. Critical appraisal In their Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films, Thomas and Yuko Mihara Weisser give Rape! 13th Hour a rating of three-and-a-half out of four stars. They write that the film has allegorical meaning beyond the gratuitous on-screen violence. The film is said by some Japanese critics to be a commentary on the state of filmmaking in Japan at the time of its release. The brutalization of women in an abandoned movie theater, for example, is interpreted symbolically. Ruriko, the ballerina who is assaulted by the two men in the film is said to have been named after the actress Ruriko Asaoka, one of Nikkatsu's stars during the pre-Roman porno "Nikkatsu action" period of the 1960s, and known at the time of the film's release as Tora-san's love-interest Lily in the popular Otoko wa Tsurai yo series. Over twenty years after the first release of the film, Japanese critics held the film in high regard, with Kinema Jumpo placing it on their 1999 list of the 200 best Japanese films of the 20th century. Some Japanese critics, however, found the film to be