Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972)

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, released by Toei in 1972, was the second of the Female Prisoner Scorpion movies. These fit into the very successful Japanese pinky violence genre but are also women-in-prison movies. They do however have a flavour of their own that distinguishes them sharply from other women-in-prison movies.

The extraordinary Meiko Kaji returns for this second outing.

Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji), nicknamed Matsu the Scorpion, is a prisoner in a maximum-security women’s prison. She is considered so dangerous that she is kept in solitary confinement in a cell which is in fact merely a hole in the ground. Just to make sure she is kept chained. The Warden also has a personal grudge against her.

What makes Matsu so dangerous is her patience. She is prepared to wait a very long time for her revenge. She often appears so passive that one might think she has lapsed into catatonia. But all the while Matsu watches and waits. Sooner or later her enemies will make a mistake. If you wait long enough everybody will eventually make a mistake. When that happens Matsu strikes, just like a scorpion.

Of course Matsu escapes, along with six other women prisoners. They find themselves in a weird almost post-apocalyptic landscape. They find refuge in a village buried beneath volcanic ash.

They are being hunted, but these women are very dangerous prey.

What makes this movie so interesting is that it abandons any pretence at realism. This is more like a folk tale. It has some of the flavour that you get in Japanese stories of the supernatural. There are hints of the supernatural, or at least hints that we are in a world that is not the world of everyday reality. Matsu is like a figure from a story of ghosts, demons and monsters.

This feeling is increased by some extremely interesting choices by director Shun'ya Itô. He directed the first movie in this series but this second film is very very different. The colour palette he uses is all blues and greys. This has now becomes one of the most tiresome of all cinematic clichés but in 1972 it was fresh and original. It emphasises the feeling that we are in a kind of fairy tale/folk tale world.

He uses lots of disturbing camera angles, freeze frames and moments of total silence. Matsu often appears as if she is in the frame, but perhaps in another plane of existence, cut off from ordinary reality. At times we wonder if she is a woman or a ghost.

He uses colour boldly. He will suddenly switch from blues and greys into an explosion of reds.

This is an incredibly brutal movie. The brutality is made slightly more bearable by that subtle feeling of unreality. It’s worth mentioning that while most of the male characters are vicious sadists the women in this movie are just as vicious.

There is a temptation to approach this movie in feminist terms but while it might be valid I don’t think that’s a rewarding approach in this case. When Japanese movies in the 70s dabbled in politics they invariably did so in excruciatingly obvious and heavy-handed ways. When this movie gets into political territory it loses direction badly. Fortunately soon afterwards it make another much stranger and more interesting detour, into the world of dream and the unconscious.

Meiko Kaji is incredibly intense, even by Meiko Kaji standards. She does not get a single line in the movie until very close to the end and she speaks a total of half a dozen words. Apart from that the only time we hear her voice is when she sings the movie’s theme song.This all adds weight to the suspicion that she is not really of this world. Perhaps she was once a woman but is now something else.

You can see this as a female revenge movie but it’s more complicated than most such movies. If you look at other female revenge movies made at that time, such as the excellent Hannie Caulder (1971) or Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1974), they’re quite straightforward. They’re about women seeking vengeance on men who have done them great wrongs. But Matsu (in both the first two Female Prisoner films) takes her revenge on women who have wronged her as well as men. And in Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 the lines between good and evil are not always clear-cut. Is Matsu a woman seeking righteous vengeance or some kind of avenging angel or even an avenging demon?

We also do have to consider the possibility that Matsu is in fact totally insane.

This is a bizarre movie, a blend of surrealist dreamscapes and pop art and exploitation. It has no right to work but it does work. And there are plenty of wild crazy visual flourishes. Highly recommended if you’re not afraid of the bizarre.

Arrow have released all four Female Prisoner Scorpion movies in a Blu-Ray set.


I’ve also reviewed the first Female Prisoner Scorpion movie, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion.