Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41

Matsu has been held in a cell for a year. The prison governor is taking his revenge; she had wounded him before and she has been paying for it since. One day an inspection arrives from the ministry and the prisoners are taken out to the fields. The escape begins there. Six other women get away with Matsu; all are serving heavy sentences and there is no solidarity among them. They move through the mountains. On the way they come upon an abandoned village and an old woman. The party after them is closing in. Shunya Ito directs. Meiko Kaji plays Matsu. It is the second link in the series and was made at the Toei studio. The production belongs to the prison film genre while departing from it formally. What is most striking is the staging; the narrative leaves realism and some sections are built like a stage. The passage telling the pasts of the seven women is the clearest example. The use of colour changes by scene and some sections are tinted in a single colour. Matsu barely speaks; the character is built through look and stance, and Meiko Kaji became known through the part. The matter it works at is institutional violence; the governor and the guards are shown as those who carry out a system. The violence and the sexual violence are explicit; the film belongs to the exploitation cinema of the period and carries those elements. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese genre cinema and formal experiment. Who it is not for: the violence is very explicit, the subject uncomfortable, and the narrative hard.