Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat (1991)

Original title: 女囚さそり 殺人予告

Warning: spoilers for one of the core points of the plot are inevitable!

A young woman (Natsuki Okamoto) is working as a very capable assassin for hire. She’s not exactly a posterchild for feminist self-realization, though, for she is controlled – mentally and sexually – by her handler, who turned a traumatized girl into his own private kill and fuck device.

Her newest mission is rather peculiar: she is to go undercover in a woman’s prison to murder Nami Matsushima, known as Scorpion, a woman whose influence and unbreakable spirit are so large, she has been held in a cave below the prison for years, so she can’t infect the other prisoners with her indomitable spirit. The powers that be of the prison are just that afraid of her.

And no wonder, because as it turns out, for at least half of the prison population has turned Nami into a near mythical figure who will some day get everyone out of the hellhole, and might even threaten the structures of violence and oppression outside.

But there’s something hinky about our assassin’s mission beside the plain weirdness of the situation, a hidden truth, as well as the realization that she, like any other woman, is only a thing to be dropped and destroyed at a man’s convenience.

There have been intermittent attempts to revive the Female Prisoner Scorpion films over the years. I believe this one, directed by Toshiharu Ikeda, who lived at the wondrous place where exploitation and arthouse met, is the most ambitious attempt of them all.

This early in Toei’s V-Cinema cycle, there appears to have been something of an anything goes approach to the types of films that could be made, if they contained a bit of action and nudity, at least. So making a film that’s a sequel to the first two films of an old 70s exploitation series – the rest of the films can’t have happened in this film’s world – that turns the originals darker by virtue of their heroine having been murdered, her dead body walled in must have sounded like a good idea to someone. While I generally don’t like that kind of set-up – let heroic achievements of earlier movies stand – I can’t help but admire what Ikeda does with the idea here.

This is very much a film about how a religion gets started, how a person’s life becomes mythical, how a poetical truth about someone becomes the only truth actually worth anything. Nami the Scorpion, the film argues rather obviously, is the patron goddess women need to survive what men do to them.

Ikeda doubles down on the mytho-religious aspects repeatedly – our protagonist is crucified, and later has a moment of bizarre revelation in which Nami’s dead body gives her the iconic sharpened spoon, literally turning her into an avatar of the Scorpion. All of this Ikeda stages without any irony, but as moments when borders between dream and reality grow thin and the mythical remakes reality in its image. It’s an incredible thing to do in a film that could be a lazy cash-in on a beloved series, but then, the space where the mythical, the real, and the commercial reality of the exploitation movie meet is something of a speciality of Ikeda. His probable masterpiece Mermaid Legend did something very similar some years earlier, perhaps even more successful than he is here.

Death Threat is also simply very satisfying as the kind of exploitation movie where all men, especially men in power, are bastards, but where those men are eventually punished by women who aren’t staying their victims. If that’s not invigorating, I don’t know what is.