Sasori: Joshuu 701-gô

This 1998 film was a remake of the 1971 hit movie Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion. Here, Nami once again gets thrown in the slammer and has to contend with the usual Babes-Behind-Bars clichés: belligerent fellow prisoners, deviant prison officials and rampant institutional injustice. Cult actress Meiko Kaji (Lady Snowblood), who played the title role in the earlier Scorpion movies appears here as a nasty prison official, and you can see right on the box what the main problem with this remake is: Meiko (lower corner) has a darkly intense charisma which shows up even in a still shot but the actress chosen for the lead role, Chiharu Komatsu, while quite beautiful, has no such presence. None. With an interesting lead character to follow around, the paint by numbers plot and routine action might have been tolerable, but Chiharu's just boring and so is everything going on around her. Once again, as in the original, Nami attempts a jailbreak, but unlike the original which had a fairly exciting jailbreak sequence, what should have been the main action sequence in the movie was something of a snore.

Nothing much worked in this one. Unimaginative, unoriginal and dull is a bad combination in action cinema.