Dragon Princess (1976)

It's 1966, and New York City has a major crime problem. The City goes for the obvious solution - hire a Japanese karate instructor to teach the cops martial arts. But there are two different instructors vying for the honour of teaching police men how to cripple their victims without guns. On one side is the intensely honourable Okinawan Kazuma Higaki (Sonny Chiba! in one of his patented cameo roles), but on the other glares evil bastard from Tokyo Hironobu Nikaido (Bin Amatsu). Higaki would be perfectly willing for the police to make a decision and just get on with things, but his enemy isn't so laid-back. When Nikaido loses a duel Higaki never even wanted, he lets his three pet assassins loose, crippling and nearly killing Higaki in front of his little daughter Yumi.

For some reason, Nikaido decides to allow Higaki to live, at least if he leaves town. Thinking about the future of his daughter, Higaki agrees and moves to LA. A bit bitter and broken, Higaki raises his daughter (soon enough to be played by house favourite Etsuko Shihomi) the martial arts training way, so that she will be able to avenge the family honour and "the purity of karate" on Nikaido. It's about as happy and satisfying a childhood for the girl as you'd expect. When Yumi punches her father too hard during training and he dies, it's time for her to go to Tokyo - to where Nikaido has returned years ago to become the Big Man of karate culture - and set her vengeance in motion.

Obviously, Yumi's enemy still uses the same trio of assassins, and just as obviously, it won't be easy for our heroine to kill them. At least there's another nice young man (Yasuaki Kurata) infiltrating Nikaido's dojo who's also quite angry at her enemies to help her out when need be.

Dragon Princess might not be the best martial arts film produced by Toei featuring Etsuko Shihomi and/or Sonny Chiba, but given how many great (or at least greatly entertaining) films these two made in the 70s and 80s, that shouldn't be much of a deterrent to anybody.

This one is still much too entertaining to be mediocre, but the mandatory madness of Toei's films in this particular genre is very subdued; in fact, if not for the sputtering mad New Yorker beginning, there wouldn't be enough madness in the movie to even use the word. Even the assassin trio is rather quotidian for a martial arts movie - I mean, honestly, if the worst you got is a blind (thanks, Sonny!) assassin who can be driven mad by a bunch of little bells, you're the straight man in this genre.

Fortunately, madness is not all I like about Toei's martial arts movies of the period, and Dragon Princess' director Yutaka Kohira fulfils all other stylistic wishes to the best of his abilities. So yes, there are scenes of Chiba, Shihomi and Kurata being 70s cool while Toei funk plays on the soundtrack, there are sudden spurts of psychedelic directing flourishes in form of anti-naturalist (but pretty) colour choices in the sets, bizarre framing decisions and some really dubious uses of tinting. The film also shows the mild distractibility (why not put a fight scene in here? what do you mean, there's no plot reason for it to be here?) I've grown to love in its kind.

It's a bit disappointing that the movie doesn't do much with Yumi's early reluctance to do karate, but on the other hand, films about reluctant fighters often tend to make their protagonists look not so much like people in true doubt about their way in life, but like lazy douches who wouldn't help an old woman who collapses right in front of them back on her feet again. And who would want to see that in a movie that ends with Etsuko Shihomi punching a guy's lungs in although she has a broken arm?

 

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New Female Prisoner Scorpion #701 (1976)

Original title: Shin joshuu sasori: 701-go

Nami Matsushima's (Ryoko Ema) older sister is working as the secretary of a man with a supposedly glorious future in the Japanese government. Somehow, sister acquires a tape proving her boss' entanglement in the sort of shady business that could destroy his career if it ever came to light. She plans to get out of the country as quickly as possible, but is kidnapped just before she can escape.

She had just been able to give the incriminating tape to Nami, but instead of giving it to the press, Nami and her fiancée try to exchange the tape for her sister. Their enemy isn't the sort of person who likes to make deals, though, and so Nami's sister ends up dead, with the blame for the murder put squarely on Nami, not without the help of her spineless fiancée who has no problem selling her out for a nice new rich fiancée and better career opportunities. Everybody is happy, except for Nami, who's put in prison.

But even there, the young woman isn't left in peace. Instead, her enemies sic the prison's warden on her who for his part hires his favourite girl boss prisoner to drive her to suicide or - if needed - simply murder our heroine.

Driven by hatred and the need for vengeance, Nami turns out to be tougher than anyone would have expected, taking every humiliation without breaking, and lashing out with frighteningly controlled violence when she needs it to survive.

After demonstrating enough of her brand of toughness, Nami leads the other prisoners in an attempted breakout.

It's not much of a surprise that Toei Studios wanted to continue the Sasori series beyond the first four successful films, even though neither their irreplaceable lead actress Meiko Kaji nor Shunya Ito, the director of the first three films of the series, were willing to take part in it further.

It's also not much of a surprise that New Female Prisoner Scorpion suffers terribly when you compare it directly with the other Sasori movies. This comparison is of course even more unavoidable with a film that plays out as a less brilliant remake of the very first Sasori movie. Although New Female Prisoner contains just as much of the nasty stuff and the technically excellent as its model and predecessor, it never manages to reach its intensity and intelligence.

Poor, beautiful Ryoko Ema is quite good as Nami, too, effectively projecting a toughness close to madness underneath her physical fragility, and I'd probably be all over her performance if I wouldn't have Meiko Kaji's reading of the same character to compare it with. It's like comparing a minor storm that knocked down a few trees in your backyard with a hurricane that has just flattened your city; although the former might be impressive in its own way, the latter is what you'll always remember.

Yutaka Kohira's direction basically suffers from the same problem. Everything on screen is up to the high standards of a Japanese exploitation movie of the 70s, the visual staging of scenes is way beyond what most directors in other parts of the world achieved at the same time working on comparable budgets, yet the shadow of Ito's original (not to speak of film two and three of the series) hangs so heavily over everything that Kohira's film can't help but disappoint. Especially problematic is how closely New Prisoner tries to stick to elements of the original films like the stylistic influence of no theatre without ever seeming to understand which role this elements had in them. How Kohira handles this is surely pretty to look at, but lacks the layers of meaning Ito brought to his work.

I suspect how much enjoyment one can derive from watching NFPS 701 depends on how much one is able to ignore the films that came before it. As a generic Japanese 70s exploitation movie, it's really a fine film; as the fifth film in the Sasori series, it's a disappointment.

 

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