Black Scorpion II: Street Combat

What can you possibly say about "Black Scorpion II" other than that it was much worse than the first. The dialogue was banal, the action minimal, the plot barely existent. Even the camera shots, especially when the director chose to go into shaky slo-mo for the "action" sequences, was gawd-aweful!

I hope Sci-Fi does a better job with it's Black Scorpion TV series (debuting this Friday, 2/9).

This cheesy B movie is fun stuff! You'll either love it or hate it. I adored it. Fans of B movies and Roger Corman movies might enjoy it the most. I've shared my Black Scorpion DVDs with friends and we've all enjoyed them. The two films and the TV show are a blast! The Gangsta Pranksta has to be seen to be believed folks! Joan Severance is lovely as Darcy Walker/ The Black Scorpion. There's also a promo on this DVD hosted by Adam West that takes an inside look at the Black Scorpion TV show. This is a fun DVD. I LOVED IT! Pop some corn and settle back. This is great popcorn fun! Ms Severance: You really know how to wear a mask! The way you smoke a cigar takes my breath away! GREAT JOB!

Just as in its prequel, this film shows a superheroine who is a sexy female copy of Batman. There is a black mask, there are gadgets, there is a special car, there is a dubious status of an ally of the police or of a criminal, the superheroine fights crime to avenge the murder of her father. If on one hand there are no scenes in this film so obviously copied from Tim Burton movies like in the prequel, on the other hand the first supervillain, Gangster Prankster, is a hybrid of the Joker and Two-Face. Argyle, the guy who fixes the Scorpion- mobile, though, came a decade before Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox in "Batman Begins". The film is nice enough for a B-movie, but visual effects are often worse than could be and action scenes are always awful. The whole movie is very cartoon-like and campy, more than Joel Schumacher's Batman movies from those years, closer to the 60's TV series. The mayor's henchmen, for example, are dressed like mobsters and always say the same thing at the same time. The street gangs (they were so recurrent in the movies from the 90's!) have youngsters with swastikas painted on their faces or necks. Sexploitation, what was in the core of the prequel, with amazing footage with Joan Severance, reappears in this sequel in more characters, like the Asian bombshell Giggles (Prankster's "harley quinn"), the model in jail in the unnecessary scene at 20'40'', the mayor's secretary Babette (played by Lara Harring!), and villainess Aftershock. Villains are campy but more interesting and less ridiculous than in the prequel, which was curiously more violent (though, Black Scorpion is much more violent against criminals, killing them when they are not a danger, in the second film than in the first, reminding more Judge Dredd than Batman even in his darkest versions). Though, the special electric attack of Aftershock may make male spectators feel as if it were with them.

...but still not awfully good. Joan Severance is a pretty decent actress and at over six feet certainly looks comic bookish, but she is badly miscast as an action heroine. She works better in slower paced vehicles and lacks the nervous energy or athleticism necessary for a costumed vigilante. Severance comes off a little better here, thanks to the fact that the director went for an old school Batman approach, with kooky angles, zippy camera-work and cartoonish colors, which tend to distract the viewer from the fact that she is too statuesque and languorous to be a crime fighter. Frankly, she would have trouble beating a dazed sloth to the punch... The story is some comic book nonsense about finding a super villain with an earthquake machine, and this is actually an improvement over the first movie's straight revenge plot. The whole exercise is pretty absurd to start, so better to just go with that. As a live action cartoon, it's not bad entertainment, and the production values are adequate despite an obviously limited budget.

I actually got this movie under the mistaken impression I was getting a Fred Williamson movie (which I believe is titled Black Cobra). Instead I got this direct to video Batman knock off. We've got a clear Joker rip-off villan, who's scenes are very over the top, and somewhat racist. The female protagonist and her lover who have no chemistry what so ever. The laughable female villan and the paper thin, Batman t.v. series plot, all played almost completely seriously even though this whole mess is very campy. The best part of this is Garrett Morris, who's actually pretty amusing as our heroine's mechanic. He's got to be an amazing one, since he's able to make/fix a car that can transform into an another one at the touch of a button. Overall, it provides a few laughs, even if its mostly boring.>