5.7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.5 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.4 |
A ruthless pack of thugs force mild-mannered, caught-in-the-middle-of-something-bigger Nami to murder her fiance's sister, decidedly ruining her pending marriage and landing the poor girl in the most brutal women's prison ever seen. Inside the hellblocks, she decides to stop being a victim at all costs, and ends up becoming stronger and even more vicious than the craziest inmates in the pen. She eventually escapes in a most unusual way, gets valuable fight training from a mysterious mountain man and returns to the streets in order to make the thugs who ruined her life pay.
Starring: Miki Mizuno, Dylan Kuo, Emme Wong, Nana Natsume, Sam Lee (III)Foreign | 100% |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Japanese: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Japanese: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 2.5 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 1.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
I’m not sure what type of women-in-prison film “Female Convict Scorpion” is aiming to be, but it’s not a very successful one. With a subgenre that typically thrives on outlandish behavior, overheated performances, and exploitation elements up the wazoo, “Female Convict Scorpion” only hints at a larger scale of madness, remaining subdued for the majority of its run time for reasons not fully understood. Boasting only a few celebratory screen elements and a handful of committed but not necessarily inspired performances, the feature is a disappointment, unwilling to truly rear back and vomit forth a particularly sticky mess of breasts, beatings, and elaborate designs of revenge. Instead, the movie is inert and weirdly incomprehensible, only tasting the sugar rush of cinematic extremity in the final act, where it suddenly finds inspiration in cartoonish violence. Until that moment arrives, it’s a long, dour journey with a one-dimensional lead character, feeling the potential of this unsavory material slowly drain away as the production fixates on a grand idea of street justice that never makes a lick of sense.
The AVC encoded image (1.85:1 aspect ratio) presentation retains a specialized look boosted with a slightly elevated contrast level, muting the potential for a crisply expressive visual experience. It's a strange looking movie to begin with, resembling a feature shot in the late 1980s, with pronounced colors embellishing the lead character's decent into Hell. Red lighting does have a tendency to blow out the image some, but the majority of the hues look passable, creating a neon atmosphere of purples and greens, while sickly yellows dominate the prison sequences. Print damage is detectable (beyond a few moments where the effect is intentional), and a minor amount of banding is present. Shadow detail is generally thick, losing edge delineation with evening and low-light encounters, with the presentation faring better in heavily lit environments, which are few and far between. There are a few passages of softness, and the image can be a little noisy at times. Skintones are largely muted, but grander displays of flesh look natural.
The 5.1 DTS-HD MA sound mix shows some sonic heft to carry this bizarre story of atonement. Directional activity isn't employed freely, but there's enough circular movement to inject some surprise into the listening experience, especially during more chaotic prison entanglements. There's also some pleasing depth to the cold penitentiary environment, with healthy atmospherics feeling out the presence of water and echo. Dialogue exchanges are preserved, though dubbed, with dramatic intentions understood. Scoring is a highlight, with a large synth and pan flute effort creating a fullness to the track, gracefully supporting the passions of the material. Fight encounters bring some low-end rumble, tackling body hits and property destruction with a pleasing shake, also working surrounds for maximum sonic firepower.
The final act is where "Female Convict Scorpion" comes alive, breaking out of its slumber with extravagant fights and a loopy hypnosis makeover for Hei Tai -- a silly plot twist that hints at a more agreeable direction for the feature had Ma loosened his approach. Finally achieving a freewheeling sense of violence and stylishness, "Female Convict Scorpion" finds a direction the rest of the movie is sorely lacking. Not that the increase is concentration translates to a coherent film, but the final blast of screen activity lends the material the energy it needs to reach a position of absurdity that's far more satisfying than the strange sensation of sourness Ma is committed to.
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