Joshû sasori: 701-gô urami-bushi

Grudge Song, Meiko Kaji's final outing as sexy female prisoner Nami Matsushima (AKA The Scorpion), opens with our beautiful anti-hero narrowly avoiding capture by the police during a wedding. Badly injured during this latest escape, our tasty fugitive breaks into a strip club where she is tended to by club employee Teruo Kudo (Masakazu Tamura), who bears a grudge against the police for torturing him when he was younger.

Grateful for his kindness, and recognising Kudo as a kindred spirit, Nami lowers her defenses and forms a relationship with the young man—but can Kudo be trusted not to betray Nami, especially when he is put under pressure by sadistic policeman Kodama (Yumi Kanei) and his brutal cohorts?

After being somewhat disappointed by director Shunya Ito's third Female Prisoner movie, Beast Stable, which I believe lacked the effortlessly cool vibe of the first two films and saw the formula becoming somewhat tired, I was excited to see that this fourth chapter for Meiko Kaji's cult character was directed by Yasuharu Hasebe, the man responsible for such delightfully depraved Pinku classics as 'Assault! Jack the Ripper' and 'Rape! 13th Hour'. Surely this guy could inject some new life into the series.

Unfortunately, Grudge Song proves to be a rather restrained affair from Hasebe, one that features little of the shocking sexual and violent content that I would normally associate with the director's work, with even the film's nastiest scene, a gang-rape, lacking his usual impact (possibly suggesting that the director was holding himself back, compelled to try and be as stylish and classy as his predecessor when dealing with such a well established franchise). Hasebe also unwisely turns Kaji's Nami into a much less sympathetic character than before, making it harder for the audience to care about her fate.

Had Hasebe given Grudge Song the same outrageous, exploitative approach that made his aforementioned titles such deviant guilty pleasures, this would have been a lot more fun, and a great way for Kaji to leave the series. Sadly, as it is, this one is my least favourite of all the Female Scorpion films.

5.5 out 10, rounded up to 6 for IMDb.

This begins well enough and has enough going on, a male helper this time, to maintain the interest until the most exciting scenes come along. It is a good idea that Meiko's seeming saviour here has had history with the police already from his days of 60s student rebellion. Flashbacks enable stand-in director Hasebe to double his violent police demonstrations with current and b/w past. This is number four in the series, however, and needed more not less in the way of interesting action and visuals. Gone are the stylish sequences and gone the surrealism. The endings, both false and actual are fun and if this is a disappointment it is no disgrace and while not the greatest of finales, probably a much better fourth episode than many might have expected. Worth seeing.

And so at last we come to the end of the great Matsu the Scorpion's bloody, weird, and incredibly thrilling saga. This is the only entry in the series not directed by Shun'ya Ito, so I was a bit nervous going into this film; I've really enjoyed all the FPS movies, and I really didn't want the final outing to fall flat on it's face.

To my great delight, this film didn't fall flat; it delivered everything I'd want from an outing with Matsu. At the same time, Matsu's story seems to be wearing a little thin; at this point in the saga she's escaped from prison with others, had her revenge, and in the last entry ("Beast Stable") she even become a kind of savior for oppressed women. In this entry, history more or less repeats itself; the storyline in "Grudge Song" is relatively the same as the first and second entries ("FPS #701" & "FPS: Jailhouse 41"), only the story is compressed into an hour and a half. If you've seen the other entries, you pretty much know what's going to happen in this entry, and while there isn't necessarily a problem (people still line up for Marvel movies, and they're all relatively homogenous), to me, the series has started to loose a bit of it's appeal, and I honestly think ending it here was probably the best choice: go out on a note that is still relatively positive, and people will be keener to return to the franchise. I, for one, will happily go through Matsu's journey multiple times in my life.

Yasuharu Hasebe (Black Tight Killers) took over for director Shunya Ito for this, the last Female Convict Scorpion picture starring Meiko Kaji (Lady Snowblood). The film opens with Nami Matsushima (a.k.a. Matsu, a.k.a. Scorpion) once again on the lam. The police track her down at a wedding, but she manages to escape. Badly injured, she is saved by a man who works in a strip joint and holds a grudge against the police for torturing him. Can the Scorpion trust a man again? Should she?

One of the reasons Kaji decided to stop doing the Scorpion pictures is that Toei kept slashing the budget with each new installment. This film is smaller in scale and more straightforward than the first three chapters. It is easily the least of the four Scorpion films featuring Meiko Kaji; however, it is still engrossing whenever she is on the screen.

More than practically every film I've seen before in my life, "Grudge Song" emphasizes the essentialness of one certain director linked to a cinematic franchise. Shunya Ito directed the first three installments of the ""Female Prisoner: Scorpion" series and they were simply phenomenal and pretty much flawless. For this fourth entry, Yasuharu Hasabe took place in the director's seat and promptly the narrative ingenuity as well as the stylish characteristics notably lowered in quality. By no means I intend to claim that "Grudge Song" is a bad film – far from it, as you can derive from the rating I've given – but it nearly isn't as breathtakingly awesome as the previous ones. But in all honesty, Hasabe can't be blamed entirely, as he actually just remained faithful to his own personalized style and filming methods. This man also directed uncompromising and vastly outrageous Cat-III movies with delicious sounding titles such as "Rape! The 13th Hour", "Assault: Jack the Ripper" and even "Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter", so you honestly can't expect this man to alter his style towards a more elegant and suggestive type of exploitation cinema. The fourth film is much sleazier and straightforward, with less likable character drawings and visually dazzling gimmicks. Hasabe obviously didn't care too much for the complexities of part three ("Beast Stable") or the deliriousness of part two ("Jailhouse 41") and returned to the gritty in-your-face mentality of the original. The script is largely a re-run of familiar themes. Nami is still a fugitive from the law and she has yet another relentless copper obsessively chasing her. She finds shelter, and even affection, in the arms of a porno theater employee who still has an old score to settle with the police. But when he get captured by the police and brutally interrogated, he betrays Nami's hideout place. Back in prison our heroine picks up her old habits of causing riots, manipulating personnel and fellow inmates and – of course – attempting to escape from the hangman's rope. "Grudge Song" is definitely still a good movie, far superior to the majority of contemporary exploitation movies for sure, but a weaker entry in the series. The plot only offers few surprises and Nami suddenly transformed into a genuine antagonist to the audience as well. You always sympathized with her before, but here she commits a handful of crimes that can't possibly be justified. She also talks a little more in this film, and her silence was part of her charming personality in the other installments. Talking in terms of visual decoration, "Grudge Song" is fairly mediocre with only a couple of noteworthy highlights (like the truly menacing POV-shots of the noose in the middle of the prison's yard). This film also immediately marked the end of the "official" Female Scorpion cycle. The successors, appropriately entitled NEW Female Prisoner, don't star Meiko Kaji in the title role any longer and aren't directed by any of the above-mentioned directors. I'm curious about the remaining two films (which I own in a fancy box set), but I'm keeping the expectations rather low just to be sure.