Wild Japan Day 1 - Female Convict Scorpion

In this sequel to Female Prisoner #701, the second in a long running 1970s feminist sexploitation series, the beautiful Meiko Kaji stars as Matsu, or Scorpion, who emerges to wreak bloody vengeance after a year of solitary in a subterranean dungeon prison. Teaming up with six of her fellow prisoners the group roam the landscape like an all female version of Seven Samurai, donned with long prison robes in place of kimonos. Their first port of call after escaping from custody is an abandoned village, which seems to have suffered some kind of volcanic disaster, where they discover an old witch (actually it is more like she is revealed to them after her house cracks and falls apart around her like an egg). This old hag is not unlike the spirit encountered by Mifune’s character in Kurosawa’s Macbeth adaptation Throne of Blood, and clutching a knife she introduces each of the seven avengers in an eerily prophetic, noh theatre style drone as each of the girls drifts into view, their seated forms extravagantly superimposed on a black screen.

Although all of the girls are responsible for crimes against man in some form, it is Oba (Kayoko Shiraishi) who becomes Matsu’s chief rival within the group. A ranting caricature of evil, she is responsible for impaling her own child in her womb after killing her husband, an event that is restaged in a surreal Kabuki style flashback. From the very beginning she vies for power over the other girls, encouraging them to beat Matsu after she is raped by the prison wardens in an attempt to tarnish her status as a hero to the other prisoners. To stretch the Seven Samurai comparison, if the demented Oba is the self-centred Toshiro Mifune of the group, then Matsu is its meditative Takashi Shimura. Kaji’s adoption of a virtually wordless performance (after she rejected the roughness of the character originally put forth in the script) maintains a quiet authority. Matsu is introduced lying chained to the floor, scraping a spoon wedged between her teeth on the hard rocks until she has fashioned it into a knife, which she later uses to lunge, scorpion like, in an attempt to remove the warden’s remaining eye (having already removed the first eye in the previous film). She doesn’t really attain this level of ruthless force again and so her silent (I won’t say subtle) performance is somewhat at odds with the extreme nature of the film, which is better suited to Oba’s hysterics.

Indeed the only thing that is more violent than the film’s subject matter (which includes torture, impalings and rape in abundance) is its aesthetic style. Despite the somewhat lacklustre narrative and dull characterisation (the remaining six girls are completely interchangeable), director Shunya Ito keeps the entertainment values high with an increasingly deranged series of experiments in lighting, editing and framing, which inspire laughter and admiration in more or less equal measure. For instance when the wardens come to collect Matsu for the governor’s visit at the opening of the film, she is framed lying in a crumpled heap at the lower left hand side of the frame as the wardens stand over her on a platform at the top of the frame, the whole image tilted into a grotesque canted composition. To further intensify the image Ito arbitrarily shines a purple light onto her. Indeed these opening sequences, in which the naive governor inspects the prison, are the most innovative in the film. The girl’s attempted riot is shot in an amusing series of tableaux that reveal the film’s manga origins.

A bizarre kitch, feminist, exploitation film, Female Prisoner Scorpion follows no rules but its own and ends with the striking image of the prisoners silhouetted on a hill of rubbish looking down upon Tokyo; as with Godzilla Japanese society won’t know what’s hit it. But there’s only so much you can do plot-wise with a group of rampaging female prisoners, especially as the hey-day of exploitation began to show signs of wear. Realising its limitations Kaji left the series after its fourth installment, although it was apparent that she had already been typecast as the vengeful girl-power icon as she went on to her most famous role in Lady Snowblood: Vengeance from the Netherworld, in which she plays a child born and orphaned in prison who hunts down those connected with her mother’s death, ticking their names off a list as she kills them. Both this and Female Convict Scorpion have had a clear influence on Tarantino’s Kill Bill, indeed the theme song ‘Flower of Carnage’ (sung by Kaji herself) features prominently on Tarantino’s typically eclectic soundtrack.