Develiker terrible... so disappointed.

WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

gavin6942 Matsu, known to the prisoners as Scorpion, is locked away in the bowels of the prison as revenge for disrupting the smooth operation of the prison and for her disfiguring attack on the warden. Granted a one day reprieve due to the visit of a dignitary, she takes advantage and attacks the warden again. This leads to more brutal punishment and humiliation. But the punishment gives her an opportunity to escape along with six other female prisoners.Jasper Sharp notes that while the 1970s were full of women in prison films all around the world, the Scorpion films were "far better made and far less exploitative, and adopting an almost fantastical approach to the material". He also notes that this second part, interestingly enough, spends a great deal of time outside of the prison.There is is a definite shift from the first film. We still get a sense of color, letting us know the director actually cared. But we also have the exploitation angle toned down a bit. If you're counting the naked bodies, you will notice they have decreased sharply this time around. Whether that makes this a better film is open to debate, but it indicates the people involved believed they had something to sell besides naked bodies.

Atavisten In a female prison we have two sides, the sadistic prison wards (men) and the vengeful prisoners (women) and although we know these women must have committed some heinous crimes to be in such a prison we also see that the treatment they get must only result in one thing, revenge! 7 girls manage to escape the prison and their sins are not echoing the 7 deadly sins of the bible, it boils down to crimes of jealousy or hatred for loved ones. This simplifies their motives and they are simple creatures also, but so is the other side. At any rate are few movie heroines unbreakable like these are as they are somehow restoring some justice in a male chauvinist world, those pigs deserve it.Kaji Meiko is as cold as the blade of her butcher knife and is great as mute and tougher than Clint, the others were well cast also, but I could wish for some better acting, in specific from the child killer. Anyway, this is not a Bergman movie.The end result is much more than mere exploitation and visual shock, this is for fans of Dario Argento who also knows who Valerie Solanas is.

Coventry The first film in this acclaimed Japanese exploitation cycle, entitled "Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion", literally perplexed me because it was such an atypical W.I.P accomplishment. It had a great story, a likable heroine character, stylish photography and - shockingly enough - only a minimal amount of nudity and perversion. The second entry in the series, entitled "Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41", actually astonished me even more! This time because it's such an atypical sequel. The formula of the original film clearly worked, so you would expect and even respect director Shunya Ito and his crew to embroider on the same successful elements, but they don't. In fact, the concept is completely different and easily the most innovative one ever used in a W.I.P film. Most of the action takes place outside the prisons' walls, during an escape that gradually changes into a wild and surreal 7-headed girl-power road trip across the desolate Japanese countryside. Seen from a certain viewpoint the script's drastic change of direction is actually rather logic, since the protagonist's engaging background story properly ended in part one. Scorpion successfully extracted her vengeance and returned to prison to serve a deserved sentence this time. But still, the completely alternative set-up is courageously ambitious and not just the story lines vastly changed, but nearly everything else as well, including atmosphere, imagery, editing, the depiction of violence and even the Matsu's entire persona! She now fully embodies bitterness and ferocity, which is masterfully illustrated through Ito's visionary direction. Matsu barely speaks five complete sentences during the whole film, yet her stares penetrate through the thickest skulls and she catches each suspicious sound in massive stereo. Since her virulent escapades, which even cost the headmaster's eye, Matsu spent the last year in a moist pit underneath the prison. She's allowed one day of daylight when a government inspector comes to visit and this is already enough for her to cause a major hoedown. Severe punishment ensues, but Matsu and six others manage to escape. Their journey turns into a crusade of retaliation against all (male) foes. The convicts' "road trip", if you can refer to it like that, is truly surreal and artsy and often nightmarishly macabre! They encounter a witch who eerily narrates the women's stories, rapists on tour, numerous abstract and depressing tableaux and – last but not least – collective hatred. Especially the vicious Oba battles Matsu for the honor of most respected jailbird. There's a lot of dreamy and addictive weirdness going on during the escape, but nonetheless the actual prison and revenge footage remains the best and most exciting. Both the opening and climax are tremendously brilliant, and even though everything in between is quite uniquely experimental and accomplished, it occasionally gets in the way of the good old exploitation themes. Meiko Kaji's performance is once again marvelous and she receives excellent support from Kayoko Shiraishi (who's overacting actually works) as Oba and Fumio Watanabe as the sadist head warden. Great stuff!

fred-287 ...in which the eponymous heroine, kept in what must be the dungeon below the dungeon in a Japanese prison with her hands and feet bound, keeps occupied scratching out notations with a piece of metal in her mouth before the one-eyed warden shows up--apparently it's because of her that he's one-eyed, so she's on his hit-list-with-an-extra-letter. He has his subordinates blast her with a water cannon (maybe this inspired a similar scene in Don Siegel's "Escape from Alcatraz"?) and asks almost plaintively why she doesn't just go crazy already. (Ya mean, um, she wasn't?) It's pretty clear the warden is the Bad Guy and the female convict is the Victim. We never do learn why she poked his eye out earlier, or why she's in prison in the first place, or why any of the female inmates are. Presumably they were all done dirt by evil male people.Once the plot gets underway, the movie immediately becomes less interesting. A bunch of female inmates manage to escape (it helps that all the male guards are morons as well as evil) and commandeer a bus armed with, as I recall, one knife, a pair of chopsticks and a really mean looking origami creature (okay, I made that up). The passengers on the bus are mostly male Japanese war vets who before getting taken hostage are seen bragging about the women they raped in the war, thus establishing their credentials as sexual predators on top of the standard male traits of being evil and stupid. ---Oh, and cowardly of course, guess that goes without saying. In one scene a female escapee unwisely leaves the group and encounters some men who, without missing a beat, immediately rape and kill her. The sequence has almost a perfunctory air to it, as though merely reminding us of the obvious.In a way all postwar Japanese cinema has the same theme: the emasculation of an ancient and formerly proud culture. Like the Sand Kings in a sci-fi story I read years ago, they're excellent adapters. Assign them a task and they "go nuts" with it. After the war their task (at least as they perceived it) was to obliterate the essence of maleness by lampooning and exaggerating it to death. Even in the straight-up Japanese bondage/SM flicks there's a hint of ridiculousness in whatever the men are doing. The women, on the other hand, remain sublimely serene and dignified, even if they're getting suspended upside down or whatever. Each gender seems to know what role to play, as in their traditional Noh/Kabuki theater. ("I like Noh theater." "What do you have against theater, Mike?".....)Anyway there's a climax of sorts with the Scorpion chick and the warden which I won't give away although I'm not sure it makes any difference. The director immediately follows that up with a closing shot of all the female convicts running along in their striped uniforms that look like those of soccer players, as though slyly acknowledging that the whole point of the enterprise was watching a bunch of cute chicks. Not much about the movie lingers in the mind except some medium-close shots of the heroine staring balefully at the camera; her face barely moves and she only has a few lines of dialogue. Too bad she never found her way to America (so far as I know) where she could have been in some REAL butt-kickin' exploitation stuff. Imagine if she'd substituted for the terminally insipid Ali MacGraw in Sam Peckinpah's classic "The Getaway," which was being filmed about when "Scorpion" was. That would've been a blast.There seems to be a Japanese word for everything, and one I especially like is KOROSHI, "death by overwork." So gentlemen, along the way to this inevitable end of ours, feel free to partake in some cheap thrills as in "Scorpion," artfully filmed cheap thrills at that. But stick with American beer; the Japanese stuff is bizarre and not hugely potable....