Événement

FEMALE PRISONER SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 41

"An absolutely phenomenal surrealist-cum-exploitation picture...one of the truly genuine masterpieces of violent 1970s cinema" - Phillyfests.com

Pinky Violence was a subgenre of sexed-out, ultra-violent exploitation movies that ruled Japan for over a decade. And Meiko Kaji was the reigning warlord of Pink. In JAILHOUSE 41, the greatest and most hallucinatory installment of the infamous Female Prisoner Scorpion series, Nami Matsushima aka Scorpion (Kaji) continues her quest for dark vengeance and becomes an unlikely symbol of female resistance in a male-dominated world. She is a force of nature who leads her fellow inmates on a journey of discovery and revenge in a movie that smears the line between art and exploitation. With influences as diverse as Greek tragedy, Noh theatre, Orson Welles, and Sergio Leone, director Shunya Ito erases the generic expectations of a womens prison movie almost immediately from the viewers mind with a phantasmagoric opening sequence that quickly reveals itself as merely an appetizer to a banquet of dazzling set pieces that seem more at home in a museum than a grindhouse.

Combining the widescreen artistry of Seijun Suzuki and the documentary-style kineticism of Kenji Fukasaku, Ito takes us on a wild ride with a gang of inmates who escape early in the movie and try to make their way through the Japanese countyside. Along the way, each prisoner recounts their own tragic stories, all presided over by the nearly completely silent but nonetheless magisterial Scorpion, whose steely stares are worth more than thousands of lines of dialogue. As the characters work out their internal struggles the outside world closes in, leading to a stunningly bizarre climax. Highly stylized even for the standards of this exceptional franchise, Shunya Ito gives free reign to his experimental tendencies, offering a brutally compelling film that's haunting and intoxicating in equal measure.