2.06.2008

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972)

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion is everything that was right with Japanese movies in the 70s. Conversely, it also happens to be nothing that is wrong with modern Japanese movies (ghost girls, choppy editing, ridiculous pace).

It takes place mostly in one of those awful and corrupt prisons you see in movies all the time, where everyone involved is a total and irredeemably evil scum bucket. The basic flow of this movie involves the protagonist, Nami Matsushima, being abused until she flips out and gets her revenge.

This movie has a sense of humor believe it or not. It's not all gloomy barbarism in the prison! This is a pretty violent movie, but none of it is serious. Witness that part where a certain someone gets a glass shard in his eye and he sort of just stands there angry, like there's not a giant shard of glass in his eye! There's a lot of black humor in this movie.

Nami does a lot of sitting around taking abuse in this movie. But at the end (I don't think this is ruining anything for anyone) she runs around in a stylish black overcoat and hat kicking so much ass it's unbelievable. The last 10 minutes or so of this movie is AWESOME. I mean, even more awesome than the first 80 minutes.

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion jump-started a whole series of Female Prisoner movies in Japan. I haven't seen any of the others and have heard they aren't nearly as good as this one.

2 comments:

joncalibur said...

that sounds great! i'd like to check out the trailer next time at least :D

newtmonkey said...

they probably have the trailer online for this, but this is one of those movies that is 90+ minutes of distilled coolness so I dunno if a trailer is enough. I think you'd watch the trailer and go, "Wow, another exploitation movie from the 70s."