FEMALE PRISONER #701: SCORPION, 1972, Dir. Shun’ya Itô, 87 Mins, Arrow Films, Japan

In Japanese with English subtitles.

A howl of rage wrapped in barbed wire and blood-red silk, FEMALE PRISONER #701: SCORPION isn’t just a women-in-prison flick, it’s a primal scream echoing through the exploitation era. Shunya Itō’s audacious debut takes the grindhouse blueprint (sadistic guards, communal showers, gratuitous nudity) and detonates it with hallucinatory style and a heroine forged in fire and betrayal. That heroine? Nami Matsushima, aka Scorpion, played with blade-sharp intensity by Meiko Kaji in the role that would cement her as an icon of vengeance. Once a wide-eyed woman in love, Nami is chewed up and spat out by a crooked cop lover, raped, brutalized, and caged in a hellhole where the rules are cruelty, humiliation, and survival. But under that stoic mask, something monstrous is coiling. Something patient. Something lethal. A riot of violence, eroticism, and surrealist style, FEMALE PRISONER #701: SCORPION isn’t a film you watch, it’s a film that watches you back, silently judging as it sharpens its knife. From its howling enka theme (sung by Kaji) to its anarchic climax, this is exploitation as high art: savage, hypnotic, and utterly unrepentant.

FORMAT: DCP

BLIND WOMAN’S CURSE, 1970, Dir. Teruo Ishii, 85 Mins, Arrow Films, Japan

In Japanese with English subtitles.

A hallucinatory cocktail of gangland swagger, gothic chills, and grotesque spectacle, BLIND WOMAN’S CURSE (a.k.a. BLACK CAT’S REVENGE) is what happens when a yakuza flick stumbles into a fever dream and never makes it back. Japan’s self-crowned King of Cult, Teruo Ishii, throws everything into the pot: arterial spray, tattoo-flaying body horror, slapstick fart gags, and a black cat that might actually be Satan. The result? A film that slashes genre boundaries as ruthlessly as its dragon-tattooed heroine.

FORMAT: DCP