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.
