V-Cinema Essentials 6: Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat

There’s definitely something brave (or stupid) about remaking/continuing – which, I had no idea – the Female Prisoner 701 Scorpion films. Moreover, anyone trying to fill the shoes of Meiko Kaji’s titular character is going to be up against it. But a film directed and co-written by Mermaid Legend, Scent of a Spell and Evil Dead Trap director, Toshiharu Ikeda At least has a chance. So time it was to once again dip my toe again into V-Cinema and Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat. 

A young nameless Assassin (Natsuki Okamoto), trained to be a killer by yakuza Kaizu (Minori Terada), is hired to kill Sasori – yes, the Nami Matsushima – who has spent two decades in the bowels of the prison. But as the young assassin enters the prison as an inmate, the contract turns out not to be quite what it seemed. 

Surprisingly, Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat is a revisionist film. Rather than trying to remake the original film, or just be another sequel, it in fact takes off from the story presented in Female Prisoner 701 Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, just decades later. Aspects of Jailhouse 41 are worked into the narrative, and I think it’s a genuinely good ploy. It places us into a new part of the Scorpion story without trying to replicate anything. So as a concept I was totally onboard and the film, as it unfolds, plays with this idea even further and it’s smartly done. 

As an idea then, how Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat is worked into Meiko Kaji’s original film world really works. Tonally, too, Ikeda captures much of the grim brutality of the previous films. The guards and those running the prison being out for themselves, brutal, brutalising and generally a bunch of bastards and lechers. Considering this is merging film worlds this is pretty key, as is the world of the women in the prison. As in Kaji's films, they are no united front, instead clannish and out for themselves, but one thing runs through almost all the inmates, especially the prisoner that runs the roost, Shindo (Mineko Nishikawa) and this is the sense that Sasori is still there, a spiritual presence holding them all up. Sasori’s refusal to lie down, to bend to authority, even if she may be two-decades in the bowels of the prison - she has reached a point of near deification to the inmates. Sasori has transcended human form to become a symbol and an aspiration. 

Not for all, admittedly, there are those that scoff and mock but for the majority Sasori is a god. Shame then that our young assassin has to kill her. Assuming everything is all it seems. 

And as it is not – and this is no surprise, the theme of betrayal, especially men betraying women for their own venal ends, raises it head and this is no spoiler because we know it must happen. After all, the original theme song – the song of a woman being bitterly betrayed – plays in a pop version over the title sequence. We all know where this is going. Equally much of the plot goes where it must, with our assassin, Shindo and others bucking the system as the bodies – on both sides – pile up. 

What’s really intriguing though is how the film transforms into something almost spiritual, with Sasori, with Nami Matsushima, passing the torch (or rather the spoon worn down to a knife) to our assassin. Our assassin is transformed by prison, by betrayal and by the spirit of Sasori into Sasori reborn. It’s almost as if Sasori is now not a person but a force of nature and aspects of the story seem to bear this out, our Assassin at moments seemingly helped by unseen forces, moving like smoke and leaving a trail of vengeance. 

This is all great stuff but bizarrely, considering Ikeda is at the helm, what fails the film utterly is the pace of it. There is some striking imagery: our assassin at the opening, erupting from an oil can in a violet glow; later, tied to a red cross (which definitely adds to the sense of spiritual transference and the obvious religious imagery), but the film is curiously leaden, almost plodding and lacking in energy. For all the excellence of the ideas, it somehow drags along despite a trim 90 minute runtime.

There are a few extraneous pieces certainly. A flashback to how our assassin was found by the yakuza, despite having a specific importance that connects to Sasori’s fate, is tired and trite. We don’t need the details we are given as we have all we need already. But it’s that lack of energy that really kills the film. Where it should be brisk and exciting it just seems bogged down and as the film moves into its second half becomes its most enervated. It’s so very strange and so very surprising to find it so because it effaces all the hard work that had been done conceptualising the story. 

The lack of narrative energy is a shame, because there is so very much that could have propelled Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat into the pantheon of great cult films but it’s ultimately plodding and ironically lacks the spirit of the original.