Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701's Grudge Song (1973)
The fourth and final Female Prisoner Scorpion movie to star Meiko Kaji as 'Scorpion'. Director of the first three films Shunya Itō is here replaced by Yasuharu Hasebe.
Scorpion is again lying low, but acting on a tip-off the police storm a wedding chapel where she is working. After a furious battle and foot chase she manages to escape. Badly injured she hides out near a strip club. Kudo, one of the club's male staff, finds her, and having received several vicious beatings from the police himself in the past, takes pity and shelters her. Once she has recovered the two of them carry out an armed robbery on a police payroll convoy(!) and are pursued by the particularly vicious and amoral Inspector Kodama (a terrific performance by Toshiyuki Hosokawa). However, during the course of their escape and efforts to avoid capture they accidentally cause the death of Kodama's wife, making him doubly vengeful, vowing to beat Scorpion to death with his own hands. After managing to evade capture for some time Kudo is finally caught and tortured once more by the police, who are determined to break him, allowing Kodama to get his promised revenge on the Scorpion...
The change in director means this final entry isn't as surreal as the others, with the violence feeling more gritty, and the detectives behaving like Japanese versions of those from the classic 1970s UK police drama The Sweeney. Meijo Kaji is as good as ever in the title role, and the sleaze factor is ramped back up to that of the first film. There's a useful line when the police try to arrest Scorpion at the wedding chapel, where we find that she's currently wanted for the murder of eight police officers, three prison breaks, and 28 attempted escapes! (They don't even bother saying how many gangsters she's killed - they're probably still counting!) However, the film suffers from the fact that even more than in the last one, some of Scorpion's actions are hard to get behind. Also, some plot points are ridiculous to the point of screaming 'last minute rewrites'. For example, what is the point of taking all the risks involved with breaking someone out of a maximum security prison on the morning of their execution by hanging, just so you can take them somewhere else and execute them - by hanging?!? I can only imagine that events after the escape were originally supposed to play out differently. But it's still enjoyable, and whilst it doesn't reach the level of the first two films, it's on a par with the third. 7/10