You ever watch a movie or listen to an album for the first time and instantly fall in love with the actor, director or band and find yourself wondering "where the hell have they been all my life!" A few months ago I had that very revelation when I watched the 1972 Japanese cult classic Female Convict Scorpion Jailhouse 41 and its star, Ms. Meiko Kaji.
When I discovered the film was one of a series featuring the character, I added the only other title available on DVD, Female Prisoner Convict #701, to my Netflix queue. And then preceded to kind of forget about the film as it took the usual six or seven months to travel up to the top of my queue. I finally got around to watching it this week. Turns out I saw the second part first. But I just pretended that I watched it in the correct order, and Convict #701 was a prequel.
In the films, Kaji plays Nami Matsushima, aka Sasori, aka Matsu the Scorpion, which like another great Japanese exploitation series of the 70s, the Lone Wolf and Cub films, is based upon a manga comic series. Matsu is sent to prison by her scummy detective boyfriend, where she is beat, raped and harassed by the guards and other convicts. She escapes at any chance she can get and often starts prison wide riots.
What struck me most about Meiko is that for someone so beautiful, she is very convincing at playing an utterly remorseless, hellbent on vengeance, killer. With the exception of one cellmate in Convict #701 (who winds up killed) she has no friends or any human emotions. If you are escaping with her and can't keep up, well, sucks to be you. This is Clint Eastwood in the Dollars films or Lee Marvin in Point Blank. And like Clint, she speaks as little as possible, letting her actions and presence do her talking.
The films, besides featuring brutal violence and great performances by Meiko, are also stylistically impressive. I first heard of Jailhouse 41 from an online list of films that inspired Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, and it definitely, along with Lone Wolf and Cub and the Leone westerns, tops the list in that department. Director Shunya Ito frequently experiments with exaggerated angles and color and instead of cutting to a flashback, he'll begin it along the lines of having Scorpion lying down in present time in the lower center third of the screen and have the flashback take place simultaneously in the upper 2/3s.
As for Meiko, she had quite the career in Japanese exploitation films. Along with the Scorpion series, she also appears in a series named Lady Snowblood (which based on the DVD cover alone appears to have inspired the snowy finale between Lucy Liu and Uma Thurman in Volume 1 of Kill Bill), I look forward to catching those in the near future. In addition to her acting career, she's had a solid singing career, including songs that play throughout the Scorpion series and during the credits of, that's right, Kill Bill Vol 1.
As I did research on Meiko Kaji, it appears that the third and fourth (and final) episodes of the series, Beast Stable & Grudge Song will be released on DVD next Tuesday. Oh Joy!
I know I promised a Brick, Art School Confidential, Lady Vengeance triple shot review in the last post, it's next.
