Female Prisoner Scorpion Trilogy

Besides some theatrical trailers, the extras in this boxset are all confined to the attached booklets or liner notes.

A pair of two-page essays by Matt Palmer (co-curator of the Wild Japan: Outlaw Masters festival) comes with the discs for series opener Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion and its immediate sequel Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41. In the first, Palmer reveals, amongst other things, that it was actress Meiko Kaji's (brilliantly effective) idea to reduce her heroine's spoken lines to virtually nothing, while in the second he argues for the sequel's "near perpetual state of delirium" where everything is "amped to the max" and "it seems that almost anything could happen next", as director Shunya Ito "joyfully sets off to explore completely uncharted cinematic territory."

There is no booklet accompanying the disc for Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion: Beast Stable, but there are always the abstract yet insightful liner notes by Craig Keller (one of the producers for Eureka!'s The Masters of Cinema series), complete with an eccentric selection of 'factoids and trivia' about the film.

It is a pity that this boxset did not receive the full Masters of Cinema treatment, with additional, more deeply probing essays, and maybe even a scholarly background featurette or two and some excerpts from Tooru Shinohara's original manga for comparison. As it is, though, the films speak loudly for themselves, and it is a joy to have them rounded up and caged in a single collection like this. Trust me, any cinephile will be only too happy to do the time with these discs.