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Your
average "Women In Prison" film is a
grungy, gritty, nasty piece of work about human
degradation and the sick depravities inmates are
made to endure. Vicious and unpleasant, their
stories usually revolve around a newly incarcerated
pretty young girl either innocent of her accused
crime or naively lead into a life of sin by others.
But anyone who might have chanced across one of
the Female Prisoner 701 movies would have
been very surprised by how the conventions of
the genre can be adhered to so closely but rendered
so beautifully. More arthouse than grindhouse,
this series of films delivers the expected grim
goods but in such an intelligent fashion as to
completely transcend the genre it's a part of.
Each scene feels as if it were carefully arranged
to not only communicate the necessities of the
moment, but to craft another visual piece of a
puzzle that will only be wholly appreciated in
the end. Watching these movies is to see WIP film
conventions used at their most pure, exposing
both the truth and beauty of the story's core.
I cannot recommend this movie and its sequels
highly enough.
As the film opens, Nami Matsushima,
AKA "Matsu the Scorpion" (the magnificent
Meiko Kaji), is using a commendation ceremony
for the prison warden to stage a daring daylight
escape attempt. She and her accomplice Yuki (Yayoi
Watanabe) are quickly recaptured and tossed into
solitary confinement. Bound hand and foot, lying
on the floor and tormented by the guards, Scorpion
recounts her story in flashback.
Three years before she had
been in love with a narcotics police officer named
Sugimi (Isao Natsuyagi). He had asked her to help
him on a case by infiltrating a yakuza-run nightclub
and naively she agreed. Her secret was quickly
discovered by the criminals and she was beaten
and raped by them mercilessly. When she learns
that Sugimi was merely using her to set himself
up for a piece of the action, the enraged and
humiliated Nami stalked him to police headquarters
and attempted to kill him. It is for this attempted
murder she now serves a lengthy sentence in jail.
In the intervening years Sugimi
has become a very prosperous crooked cop but his
crime boss thinks that Nami's repeated escape
attempts should be stopped. The yakuza is concerned
that if she manages to get out she might ruin
the cozy arrangement with their tame cop. He orders
Sugimi to enlist the help of another inmate named
Katagiri who can be enticed to murder for a price.
Let back into the general population,
Scorpion intervenes in a fight between two rival
inmates, resulting in the warden (Fumio Watanabe)
being stabbed in the eye! The injured warden cracks
down on everyone to get the inmates to turn on
his most troublesome ward but has little success.
Ratcheting up the pressure, he forces all prisoners
into pointless backbreaking manual labor. After
this gets no response from the defiant woman he
forces Scorpion to continue digging an enormous
hole throughout the night with no rest. When the
other inmates return to see the weary woman still
at work after 24 straight hours, a series of events
cause a riot to break out. Katagiri (Rei Yokohama)
uses the chaos to take a shot at Scorpion but
instead kills Yuki, who dies in her friend's arms.
A large group of prisoners end up in a standoff,
holed up in a prison warehouse with three guards
as hostages. Whipped into a frenzy by the crafty
Katagiri the women tie Nami into a net and torture
her while other inmates rape the terrified guards.
After hours of waiting the guards manage to regain
control of the convicts but in the confusion Scorpion
kills Katagiri and finally makes her escape. Once
in Tokyo she begins exacting righteous vengeance,
taking out the yakuza men she remembers and working
her way toward Sugimi.
Not just a compelling exploitation
film combining archetypal WIP elements with a
female revenge story, director Shunya Ito takes
Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion
into amazing expressionistic areas. Almost never
content to frame the actors in a standard way,
he often tilts the camera making the entire widescreen
image a thin but tall shot of characters in conflict.
He also employs beautiful color symbolism to get
across shocking bits of subtextual information.
One of the most striking of these is in the explanatory
flashback when Nami tells of her love for Sugimi.
The image of a red circle on a white field representative
of the Japanese flag both implicates the nation
in her tragedy and implies the subtle idea that
she surrendered her virginity to Sugimi. With
this almost subliminal information her incredible
drive for vengeance becomes both more sympathetic
and possibly symbolic of the betrayals of the
public trust many public servants are guilty of.
Other artful touches include some gorgeous painted
backgrounds and sunsets later in the film and
even the sharp costuming choices for Scorpion
as she goes about her blood-soaked hunt in Tokyo.
Dressed in black with a Shadow-like slouch hat
pulled down over one eye, she is the embodiment
of remorseless death. There is one of these cinematic
moments that I felt was perhaps a little over
the top... In the sequence in which the inmate
stabs the warden there is a minute or so when
the enraged woman is lit with nightmarish colors
and transformed into a kabuki-faced demon. It's
well done and certainly grabs your attention but
it is the least well-integrated hyper-stylistic
scene. It isn't bad but it is a bit hard to take
as seriously as rest of the movie. That being
said, the shift back to realism once the warden
is injured is bracing and effective.
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Media
Blasters/Tokyo Shock has issued this along with
the third
and fourth movies in this series on Region
1 DVD. They have done a very good job with this
one. The image is sharp and colorful, presented
widescreen and enhanced for 16X9 TVs. As director
Shunya Ito makes full use of every inch of the
2.35:1 picture I can only imagine how completely
incomprehensible a cropped version of the film
would be. The only soundtrack is in Japanese;
the optional English subtitles are very good with
only a couple of minor typos. (There are a few
instances of hiss early on but it seemed to clear
up quickly.) The only extras are a photo gallery,
the theatrical trailer and some bonus trailers
of other Tokyo Shock releases. The sparse extras
should b no impediment to the curious as this
film is a fantastic example of Japanese exploitation
filmmaking and should be required viewing for
anyone with any interest in WIP movies. This is
an exceptional film.
6/11/07
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