|
|
Female
Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 Wow, I don’t know where to start on this film. Really quite extraordinary slice of subversive surrealist early 70s filmmaking, easily as good as any “serious” cinema put out during this fertile period. Like other directors have found, it’s easy to be weird and subversive when working in a ghettoized genre like women in prison films. Or maybe nobody clued in director Shunya Ito that he was making disposable crap, because the bizarre fantasy world he created is a beauty for the ages. Spoiler alert: gonna talk about this here movie’s plot, ya know? During the opening credits we are in solitary confinement with our heroine Matsu, otherwise known as Scorpion, shackled hand and foot lying on the cell floor sharpening a spoon held in her teeth! The guards come in and hose her down in a scene that goes on uncomfortably long until it becomes downright fetishistic. This becomes a theme later on, several of the violent beating scenes go on for waaaaaay longer than you would normally see in a movie, clearly intending to bring the violence and humiliation home to the uncomfortable audience. The warden has an eye missing that Scorpion poked out, and wants to make her life a living hell. “I want to make you lose your mind,” he says, in a great love-to-hate-him performance from Fumio Watanabe. Matsu gets dragged out to display to the visiting official, and cuts Warden Goba under his good eye in an attempt to poke that one out as well. After a resulting riot is quieted down, Matsu is punished by a makeshift stations of the cross, tied to some trees tied together into a cross shape. That’s obviously not enough, so to bait us into hating him even more, the warden has 4 men rape and humiliate her in the yard in front of all the women. In an interesting narrative device, he turns the sound off part of the way through the scene, which make you focus on what is going on visually, but also seemed metaphoric for Scorpion’s need to cut out the outside world to get through this violation. Not much nudity, even the rape scenes are disturbing but not explicit. The camera focuses on the men’s leering faces in a victim’s point of view shot. The prisoners are being transported by bus, when the prisoners beat Matsu in another looooong scene of beating and humiliation. Thinking she is dead, the guards stop to look, and the girls make a break for it. Why do they stay together rather than split up? And why did the guards stop and look in he back of the truck in the first place? It’s a movie, that’s why. Shuddup already. The girls find themselves shelter in an old abandoned group of shacks and immediately beat all the wild dogs to death, in another seemingly loooong scene, and stay the night (yeah, I know) at one with an old crazy woman. There is a great Kabuki introduction to each of the 7 girls, each one in for crimes to do with men. Matsu’s foe, Oba, for example, the narrator tells us, is in for killing her own children to get back at her cheating husband. One was a two year old, and one in her own womb, she says later, dramatically flinging back her clothes to show he scar where she stabbed her own baby and almost died. Maybe she already has died. Oba, played by Kayoko Shiraishi, is a standout cruel villain. Later that night, one of the women sneaks out to see her little boy who lives in the neighboring village. The police are there waiting for her, and a great scene of several in the movie where the director uses a series of sequential snapshots for a few seconds to illustrate the action, in this case, the cops throwing her son across the room when she wouldn’t cooperate and tell them where the girls where. Scorpion is waiting for them when she brings them back, and allows the girl the dignity of killing the cop herself. News has spread, and a tour bus of stereotypical drunk loutish Japanese salarymen cruises through the girl’s turf. The filmmaker makes sure we know how worthy of blowback they are by making them share stories of raping Chinese women during World War II! So 4 horny guys come across a convict girl on the riverbank, figure why not, and in yet another disturbing scene, rape her and dump her in the river where in a spectacular and beautiful scene the whole waterfall turns red! The girls find the 4 guys and take them back to the bus, where they proceed to humiliate and degrade them in great fashion, in short to act just as they had acted towards women. They also strip clothes off their wives, make them shout Banzai, and dump Scorpion off the bus as a decoy. She tells them the hostages are dead, so the cops go blasting away merrily at the bus, killing convict and hostage alike. Scorpion escapes off into the horizon to come back in a postscript and stab The Warden’s other eye out. Much more cerebral than a typical women in prison movie, huh? That’s because it’s not, it’s a weird odyssey. Scorpion has a lot of symbolism in it -some of the Japanese symbolism I’m sure I probably missed. The Sisyphean labor of the convicts as they drag ropes pulling large rocks and the Christ symbolism of Matsu in her stations of the cross get-up and the girls appearing in robes like disciples running about an inhospitable landscape. The lighting in this cruel mythical odyssey is important to setting the mood. Based on a manga, of course. This is the 2nd in a series of Scorpion films. Good casting helps the material, especially Meiko Kaji as Matsu/Scorpion. She has about 5 words in the whole thing, and illuminates the determination, anger, and dignity and of her character through her smoldering eyes. The vengeful Warden Goba and the murderous Oba are the other vividly portrayed characters that push the story along. But ultimately, it’s director Ito’s inventive technique and closet full of avant-garde ticks that push the film out of the exploitation category and into the art-film closet. The beautiful cinematography and vivid color saturation, selective use of shadow, are all terribly advanced for a genre film. In the scene where the cops throw the boy across the room (and some others), it is presented silent and in still frame sequence, seemingly slowing down time, and perhaps leaving an opportunity to consider the consequences of violence. The DVD transfer is clean, and there is a Japanese trailer included. Look for: shoe-throwing, guard strangling, guard stabbed in crotch by tree, dog beatin’ and eatin’, groveling tour guides, seppuku, child hostage, yelling “Banzai!” shooting cops off their motorcycles through a bus window, guard shot in crotch, and eye-poking.
Review by Hysteric Eric |
