Sasori in U.S.A.

Nami - the main character from the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, made famous by Meiko Kaji - is Japan's sorriest criminal recidivist. She spends more time in prison than Linda Blair. This time she is (wrongly, of course) convicted of blowing up her boyfriend and is sentenced to a tough Arizona prison, just as a change from all of those Japanese prisons she'd broken out of over the years.

All of the usual Babes-Behind-Bars elements are present: tough female convicts who pick fights with the heroine, brutal guards, a sadistic warden and a blind Japanese girl for Nami to befriend and rescue from all of the above. They bust out of the surprisingly poorly secured maximum security prison, spend a long and quite boring sequence wandering lost in the desert - they could have been recaptured in about ten minutes if anybody had thought to phone for a chopper - and then go after revenge on the men what wronged 'em. Familiar story, but very nice production values and two attractive female leads make it watchable, and the bright sun and scorching heat of Arizona makes a nice change from the greenery and overcast skies of Japan in the earlier Scorpion movies. Japan was meant to seem like a harsh and unyielding environment, but the Great Southwestern Desert actually is! I wish I could report that the movie is a non-stop action bender, but it actually has several long sequences in which nothing much happens. The action when it comes is fairly brutal and realistic rather than the usual stylized chop socky nonsense so familiar in Asian action pictures.

Director Daisuke Gotoh clearly doesn't understand the erotic psychology behind a successful (or even interesting) women-in-prison film. I mean, the primary component of dykey-women-molesting-other-women-behind-bars seems to have completely escaped him in this one! Yoko Saito is certainly well-cast as the pretty Scorpion, unjustly accused, convicted, and thrown into a California women's penitentiary on clearly spurious grounds. But once she's there, nothing even remotely interesting happens. Yes, there are some dykey-looking women about, as well as some pretty young female inmates just waiting to be sexually victimized by them. But it never happens. There's really no lesbianism whatsoever. Instead, it's the male warden and his guards doing all the dirty work. So why the women-in-prison setting? If he didn't want to include scenes involving girls with other girls he should have set this story in a nightclub or brothel. Obviously this director knows (or cares) nothing about this genre of films, and it was very disappointing as a result.

I thought this would be really campy, kind of brutal/sexy revenge story, but it took it's time setting up and laying out the story. There were a couple ridiculous plot points, but overall it played out very simply and satisfyingly. The acting was decent to poor, but the leads were adequate. Yoko Saito did a good job as the lead playing in both English and Japanese and managed to handle some of the cheesier dialogue bits. The one real twist in the plot was worked up to very well by some of the dialogue between Nami and her male friend, not giving it away entirely, but foreshadowing effectively. Nothing new, probably not ridiculous enough for most, but a better than average revenge thriller.