Tag: Luna Takamura

New Female Prisoner Scorpion (新・女囚さそり 701号, Yutaka Kohira, 1976)

Posted on by

After the fourth film in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, star Meiko Kaji decided to move on but Toei had other ideas and opted for a reboot as signalled by the addition “shin” or “new” to the otherwise identical title to the very first film. New Female Prisoner Scorpion #701 (新・女囚さそり 701号, Shin Joshu Sasori: 701-go) moves in a slightly different direction spinning a tale of a less straightforward revenge coloured by conspiracy cinema and a series of real life high-profile corruption cases including the Lockheed Scandal, itself name checked in the film. Just a few months earlier, Roman Porno actor and fervent nationalist Mitsuyasu Maeno had lost his life in a suicide attack on the home of underworld figure and right-wing fixer Yoshio Kodama who had been instrumental in “convincing” Japanese airlines to buy Lockheed planes over McDonnell Douglas.

In any case, this Nami Matsushima (Yumi Takigawa) is an ordinary young woman who becomes concerned about her sister Taeko (Bunjaku Han) when she uncharacteristically drops out of contact after behaving strangely. Taeko is a political secretary to assemblyman Miura (Ichiro Nakatani) who is currently the vice-minister for justice and at the centre of a burgeoning corruption scandal. After Nami and her fiancée Toshihiko (Yusuke Natsu) manage to meet up with Taeko, she is suddenly kidnapped from the hotel car park while the man who was with her, Sugino (Nenji Kobayashi), is gunned down. Sugino is found to be carrying his passport and two airline tickets to Paris which, along with Taeko’s strange behaviour, imply they were planning to flee the country together. Looking more closely at the wedding presents her sister had given her, Nami realises she’s left her a cassette tape with the instruction to leak its contents to the press should anything untoward happen to her. 

Nami uses the tape as leverage with Miura to try and rescue her sister but ends up learning some unpleasant truths before being framed for Taeko’s murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Toshihiko, who had originally been supportive, betrays her, testifying at her trial that she may have been resentful that Taeko was against their marriage only to later marry Miura’s daughter and go into politics apparently siding with the bad guys. Toshihiko may have seemed like a nice guy, but it’s also true that he tried to pressure her into premarital sex that she didn’t want by insisting that he couldn’t wait for marriage, suggesting they blow off her sister and go to a hot springs in Hakone instead. Most of the men in the film are equally spineless and duplicitous not least the guards who with the exception of one are all corrupt and/or abusing the inmates. 

Not content with sending her to prison, Miura tries to have Nami offed with the assistance of the warden who puts her in a cell with the prison’s most notorious offender. Fusae (Mitsuyo Asaka) orders her minions to beat and torture Nami, at one point gang raping her while the only way she can think of to save her life is by claiming there’s another tape so if they kill her they’ll never know where it is and run the risk of the contents leaking. 

Meanwhile, she’s approached by a group of anarchists who tell her they need a leader which seems a little contradictory but nevertheless enables a jailbreak even as Nami develops a rivalry with the feisty prisoner number 804. Though she obviously didn’t commit the murder for which she was imprisoned, Nami is no pushover and in fact burns one of her tormentors alive not to mention stabbing another in the eye with a pencil and cunningly splitting a pair of scissors to gain twin knives. Rather than the classic scorpion look, she appears almost batlike, spreading her arms in her cape as she prepares to make her final act of revenge right outside the Diet building itself as if she were making a point about cleaning up politics aside from avenging her sister’s death and her own mistreatment. Director Kohira lends her a supernatural quality in her eerie silhouette as if she’s already become something else, a force of nature transformed by her righteous anger towards a corrupt society largely ruled by venal men willing to kill and use women for their own benefit or pleasure. Even Nami is forced to admit her complicity having learned her sister may have paid for her education through allowing herself to be traded by Miura as a political bargaining chip. She is not, however, willing to let it stand, resisting a controlling a patriarchal society with all of the resources available to her.

Espy (エスパイ, Jun Fukuda, 1974)

Posted on by Leave a comment

espy posterBy 1974 the Toho SFX movie was perhaps long past its heyday though Jun Fukuda’s Espy (エスパイ) was far from the last. Clearly influenced by popular spy franchises such as James Bond as well as more serious cold war spy dramas, Espy is a jet setting tale of superpowered assassins, international conspiracy, and love as an unexpected source of salvation, but as much as it embraces its hippyish message of total communication it also moves further into the realms of exploitation, skewing closer to Nikkatsu’s ’70s output than the more child friendly supernatural adventures of ages past.

The world is at breaking point. A small conflict in a tiny East European nation known as Baltonia threatens to spark a third world war. A UN delegation is currently en route to a conference in which they hope to settle the conflict in a peaceful way but all hope is lost when a sniper equipped with X-ray vision takes them all out with maximum precision.

Meanwhile, back in Japan, test driver Miki (Masao Kusakari) gets into trouble on the course when he swerves to avoid some pigeons. The car spins out of control but just at the last minute, Miki turns it around through his dormant psychic powers which brings him to the attention of the IPPG – the International Psychic Power Group. Following the assassination of the UN delegation, all eyes are on Japan where the prime minister of Baltonia is due to meet the US president in what is hoped will be a bold new development in international relations but the IPPG have reason to believe an attempt will be made on the prime minister’s life and only their ESP equipped team can stop it.

Espy takes the essential components of both the spy thriller in its international conspiracy set up, and the B-movie science fiction adventure in its presentation of the good and evil possibilities of advanced technologies or in this case innate superpowers. The Espy team are pitted against the Anti-Espy who have similar powers but are committed to using them to harm mankind. The leader of the Anti-Espy, Ulrov (Tomisaburo Wakayama), sees himself as a superior being to regular Earthlings and, believing that humans have overpopulated the planet which they continue to damage, is convinced the best solution is a mass cull. He plans to do this by helping the “lesser” humans destroy themselves by provoking a third world war or a hundred mini conflicts in which thousands will die.

Ulrov’s arguments tie in nicely with Toho’s trademark environmentalism and ambivalent attitude towards scientific development, but they go against the prevailing sense of humanism which is to be found in the studio’s genre output. In Ulrov’s fascistic view of the world, he and the other ESPers are a superior race whose existence is threatened by weaker humans and their reckless disregard for the planet as a whole. Due to a traumatic childhood incident, he believes that humans are cruel beasts who lust for blood and talk of peace with hearts filled with hate. He may have a point, but his message conflicts with the positive movement for peace which is advanced by the Baltonian PM who doesn’t want a world in which peace is brokered and balanced but one of true unity.

Espy is, however, of its time and fails to fully live out its peace and love ideals. Team member Maria (Kaoru Yumi) is kidnapped by Anti-Espy and taken to Ulrov’s lair where she is forced to dance lasciviously in front of fellow team member Tamura (Hiroshi Fujioka) with whom she shares an especially strong connection. Tamura’s arms and legs are cuffed as he communicates telepathically with Ulrov, semi-hypnotised by Maria’s strange dance. Maria is then approached by a large dark-skinned man wearing only a loincloth who proceeds to tear open her shirt at which point she snaps out of her trance, frees Tamura, and rips out the attacker’s tongue.

Meanwhile, new recruit Miki has failed in his mission and killed a man for the first time sending him into a kind of depression. Though Miki was introduced as the protagonist, he is in fact absent for most of the film though his journey is among the strangest as he reminisces about a foreign girl he was friends with as a child and enjoys an unusually strong bond with his intrepid dog, Caesar, who teaches the gang a few lessons about unconditional love. Maria is severely traumatised by her attack while Tamura reconsiders his sense of self worth having temporarily lost his powers, but eventually the team realise that their psychic abilities are nothing more than a manifestation of a great love. Ulrov later has the same epiphany but the team’s decision to consider him possessed by something “inhuman” is a worrying one. They don’t want to accept that it was humans who made him that way because it would be too sad, but not to do so is a failure to recognise humanity’s darkness as well as its light.

Espy bites off a little more than it can chew in failing to deal with some of the more interesting ideas it raises though it makes the most of its meagre budget to present an exciting spy thriller voyaging from Japan to Turkey and Switzerland. Skewing more towards Nikkatsu’s brand of exploitation action, Espy is definitely among the more adult orientated of Toho’s SFX adventures but its messages are broadly the same in its insistence on human interconnectedness as the ultimate superpower.