Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection

I’ve always been a fan of exploitation films. As a young teen, I loved the babes, the sex, the violence, the gore, and the exploitativeness of it all. I still love that stuff now, I guess, but I really love the unabashedness of those films now. Exploitation films are exactly what they say they are going to be. They don’t try to wrap that stuff up in artistic pretensions like so many other films do.

Sometimes they are actually good movies too, as is the case with at least two of the Female Prisoner Scorpion flicks. I reviewed the Arrow Video box set of all four films back in 2016 and now you can read them.

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939)

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Once again we’ve run into a film that I had forgotten I watched. I pretty much request to review anything that is offered from the Criterion Collection because they are always good, or if not good, at least interesting. Seeing this title, I instantly remembered I had seen it, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it. Reading my review makes me want to watch it again.

The story is about a Japanese kid who wants to be an actor but isn’t very good at it. He has to make many a sacrifice to hone his craft, as does his lover. The film dives into what it takes to make great art and if the sacrifice is worth it. You can read all my thoughts here.

Snowden (2016)

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Edward Snowden was a former NSA contractor who leaked thousands of documents proving the USA government was spying on its citizens. He was a complicated dude and not completely aboveboard, as one can assume since he’s become a Russian citizen, but also a hero for leaking those documents and letting us know what our government has been up to. This was all back in 2013, and considering everything else that has happened in this country since then, it all seems a little like “nothing much” which is a crazy thought in and of itself.

But I don’t like to talk about politics in these pages, and I’ll leave it at that. Of course Oliver Stone made a movie about Snowden, and I got to see it on the big screen back then. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Somewhere In Time (1980)

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Somewhere in Time is a film I’ve always felt like people loved. I thought it was a revered minor classic. I watched it many years ago and was a little disappointed in it, but when I got the opportunity to review this new UHD release from Kino Lorber, I figured it was time to give it another try.

Furthermore, I was still disappointed in it. Apprently, I was wrong thinking everybody else loved it because all my Letterboxd followers feel the same as me and all the reviews I’ve read find it to be mostly average.

Christopher Reeve becomes obsessed with an old painting of Jane Seymour and finds a way to travel back in time to meet her.

Reeve and Seymour look beautiful, and the idea of the story is interesting, but I never really bought into the romance. And the film didn’t seem all that interested in the time travel aspects.

You can read all of my thoughts over at Cinema Sentries.

Westerns in March: Hour of the Gun (1964)

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Welcome back to Westerns in March. This is my fourth year doing this theme, and I’ve come to really enjoy it. There is something wonderful about this genre with its wide-open spaces, its barroom brawls, and its shootouts. So let’s get started.

Director John Sturges made Gunfight at the OK Corral in 1957 with Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. It is a darn good film. It ends with the titular gunfight.

Ten years later Sturges revisited the story with this film, a sort of sequel with James Garner in the Earp role and Jason Robards as Holiday. It begins with the gunfight at the OK Corral and then deals with its aftermath.

An opening title notes that “This picture is based on Fact. This is the way it happened” and Sturges did strive for more historical accuracy than is usually told with these stories, though, of course, he still changed quite a bit to suit his needs.

Ike Clanton (Robert Ryan) survived the gunfight (something he did in real life but did not in the previous film) and is now taking our heroes to court. He claims his men were unarmed and had raised their hands in the air when Earp and his men shot them dead.

Clanton loses the court case but sets up his own personal war with Earp, his brothers, and Holiday. Some of them get shot, some of them get killed. Wyatt is determined to stop them, but his moral code demands he do it legally. But his stubbornness makes him bend the law to suit his needs.

Robards is terrific as Doc Holiday. This is a very different performance from Val Kilmer’s portrayal in Tombstone, but it’s still real good. I never really buy James Garner as Wyatt Earp. I’m so used to him playing rascally wiseacres that it is difficult to buy him as the deadly serious man he’s playing here.

Robert Ryan barely has any screen time, and when he does, he isn’t nearly menacing enough. He’s the main villain, and he’s far too tame to be threatening. Which is a weird thing to say about Robert Ryan, who is usually so good at playing scary dudes.

Sturges’s direction is steady but not memorable. Ultimately, the film is worth watching for Robards’s performance and if you are interested in what happened after the famous gunfight.

The Movie Journal: February 2026

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I watched 35 movies in February. 23 of them were new to me. 22 of them were made before I was born. It was Foreign Film February, and I watched 9 films that were not in English.

It was a good month. I’ve been trying to do more official reviews for Cinema Sentries. I mean, I always do quite a bit, but I’m trying to step up my game. I like writing whatever random reviews I do just for this site, but I get distracted, so I figure making requests where I have to review will get me even more in the habit, and maybe that will lead somewhere.

But that does mean I won’t have as much time for watching whatever I want. This has always been the struggle for me. I’ll get a bunch of official reviews, and they stack up on my desk. I have to watch and review them all, which means I can’t watch whatever else I want. I get tired of that and stop making requests, then I really wish I was getting the cool stuff in the mail. Back and forth. Back and forth. So I’m trying to lean into the real reviews, and we’ll see how it goes.

Which means there is less time for Foreign Film February and whatever. But still I did pretty good, nine films for the monthly theme isn’t bad.

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My most watched actors list got shaken up a little. James Stewart got bumped by Spencer Tracy. I had another one of those boxes that put Tracy up front with 5 films. Walter Brennan is tied in second place with four films, and Robert Ryan jumps into things with three films watched.

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My director’s list finally has a couple of names on it. As this is Westerns in March month, I suspect we’ll see John Ford take a few leaps forward, but who else will join him?

That’s it. Here’s the full list:

Crime 101 (2026) **1/2
Port of Shadows (1938) ****1/2
Five Star Final (1931) ****
The Astronaut (2025) ***
Bad Moon (1996) *
Somewhere in Time (1980) ***
Scream 7 (2026) **
Wolfs (2024) ***1/2
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) ***1/2
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) ****
Doctor Who: The Hand of Fear (1976) ****
Kagemusha (1980) ****
The Pyx (1973) ***1/2
Face/Off (1997) ****
The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971) ****
Mogambo (1953) ***1/2
Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) ***
Iphigenia (1977) ****1/2
Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) ****1/2
Doctor Who: The Masque of Mandragora (1976) ***1/2
Northwest Passage (1940) **
Libeled Lady (1936) ****
Fury (1936) ****
All That We Destroy (2019) **
Dillinger (1973) ***1/2
2 Minutes Late (1952) ****
The Naked Jungle (1954) ***
Borderline (2025) **1/2
Pierrot le Fou (1965) ****
Elevator to the Gallows (1958) ****1/2
Vengeance of the Zombies (1973) ***
The Five Venoms (1978) ***
Wild People (1932) **
Red Dust (1932) ****
The Sin of Nora Moran (1933) ***1/2

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Scream 7 (2026)

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I’ve written about Scream (1996) several times before. I grew up watching slashers in the late 1980s, and Scream did this amazing job of both satirizing the genre conventions and actually being one of the best films in the genre. The characters are all self-aware. They seem to know they are living inside a horror movie. Well, not that exactly; they are real characters, but they all know the horror conventions. They constantly talk about horror movies, and at one point one of the characters breaks down the “rules.”

I loved that. I’d never seen a movie where characters talked about pop culture in the same way I did. I’d often thought about the rules of horror, even if I’d never exactly put it that way. To see characters on the screen that were like me was revolutionary.

There were two immediate sequels, followed by what are now four legacy sequels that started just over a decade after the third one ended. They have mostly been a series of diminishing returns. This latest one is the worst in the franchise.

Scream satirized the entire horror genre, specifically slasher films. Scream 2 turned its eyes on sequels, and Scream 3 attempted to go after trilogies. Then there were shots at remakes, YouTube Videos, and Legacy Sequels. Scream 7 seems to just be satirizing itself, as if there are not other aspects of the genre it can poke fun at.

The legacy films in this series have been a mixed bag. Sometimes they’ve felt like they are trying to set up a new group of characters to carry the torch, and yet they can never seem to let go of the old familiar faces. I’ve seen them all, but I would be hard-pressed to tell you anything about the last three films.

Due to a salary dispute, Neve Campbell did not appear in Scream 6, but she is back front and center for this one. As is Courteney Cox. Melissa Barrera, who was set up as the main lead in Scream 5 and Scream 6, was not asked to be back for this film due to some social media-related kerfuffle. Jenna Oretega then decided not to return.

I’ve said an awful lot here without actually talking about the film at hand. There just isn’t that much to talk about.

The cold open features a couple of Stab fans (Stab being the in-movie films that basically fictionalize the events of the Scream films, if that makes sense). They come to the house that most of the characters died in the original Scream,as a sort of dark tourism satire and promptly get killed.

Sidney (Campbell) has now moved to a rural town, gotten married to a cop (Joel McHale), and has a kid who she named Tatum (Isabel May) (the name of one of her friends in the first film who was horribly killed – which is kind of weird when you think about it – and the characters in this film do think about it).

Ghostface Killer finds them and starts murdering people in very gore-filled but not so imaginative ways. He video calls Sidney and has the voice and face of the original killer in Scream. But it can’t be him because he was killed in that first film. Or can it? By this point in the franchise, anything can happen (but mostly doesn’t).

There are a lot of secondary characters who are also suspects. There is the weird kid obsessed with Sidney and her (many) run-ins with killers. There’s the boyfriend and movie nerd girl. Plus a couple of kids from the last film. There is some decent meta-humor where characters literally call these people by the names I’m using (weird kid, boyfriend, etc.).

They have the now perfunctory meta-discussion on who the killer could be, but they put no real effort into it. Gayle (Cox) eventually shows up. Her entrance is pretty good, but then they don’t seem to know what to do with her.

Scream is one of my all-time favorite horror films. I’ve enjoyed many of the sequels even while recognizing they are never as good as the original. But this one just doesn’t seem to have a reason to exist. Yet, I’m not mad I watched it. I even spent good money on it to see it in the theater (something I haven’t done since Scream 3).

But if they make another one, I hope they get rid of the entire original cast and find a way to make it feel original again. At this point this series is starting to feel like the films the original was so good at making fun of.

Foreign Film February: Iphigenia (1977)

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I’m a big fan of Radiance Films. They put out really cool releases of relatively obscure films. My understanding is that one of the guys who used to run Arrow Video now runs Radiance, and that checks out. Arrow made a name for themselves by doing some very nice restorations of low-budget cult films and giving them loads of cool extras. Radiance is doing the same but with obscure arthouse European films.

I try to get as many of them as I can, and I’m never disappointed.

Iphigenia is based on a Greek legend about Agamemnon having to sacrifice his firstborn child in order to win the war with Troy. It is a really beautiful, wonderfully made film, and I’m so glad I watched it. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Foreign Film February: 2 Minutes Late (1952)

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Pretty much whenever I watch a movie, I internally review it. More often than not, once the movie is over, I’ll spend some time mentally writing a review. Sometimes that makes it onto the page, and I post it here or elsewhere. Sometimes I get distracted, and it never goes anywhere.

Every once in a while I’ll mentally write a review and think that I have actually posted it only to discover, later, that I never did write it out. This is one such occasion. I sure thought I had written a review for this film, but alas, I have not.

The trouble is I watched this a couple of weeks ago, and the plotting details are already foggy. And because this is a fairly obscure Norwegian film from 1952, there aren’t a lot of details of the film online.

But it is still Foreign Film February, and I wanted to write something about it, so here goes.

The Criterion Channel is running a little collection of Nordic Noir, and I’ve been enjoying it. The first two films I watched weren’t all that noirish, to be honest. There were hints of noir in there, but you have to stretch the definition a little bit to categorize them as such. But 2 Minutes Late is straight-up noir, and I loved it.

Max Paduan (Poul Reichhardt) is married to the nervous, clingy, and extraordinarily jealous Grete (Grethe Thordahl). She’s even jealous of her sister Beth (Astrid Villaume), thinking her friendship with her husband might be something more.

One day Grete goes to an old bookstore to find something to read while she’s getting her hair done. She accidentally leaves her purse behind. When she returns, she finds the owner has left for lunch, but a little push on the door and it opens. She smells something strange in the store but shrugs it off, grabs her purse, and leaves.

Later she’ll learn someone was murdered in that store right around the time she was in it. Suspicions fall on Max, and it is Beth who does some investigating to find out who really did it. The plot gets all sorts of twisty, and it’s filled with lots of interesting little details. This is where my memory gets fuzzy. I don’t remember exactly where it all goes, but I do remember I quite liked it.

If you like film noir and have the Criterion Channel I highly recommend it.

Stranger On the Third Floor (1940)

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I freaking love me some Peter Lorre. I am a huge film noir fan. Stranger on the Third Floor stars Peter Lorre and is often cited as the very first noir. Several times now I’ve gotten all sorts of excited thinking about that and put this movie on only to be disappointed by it.

It isn’t a terrible film, but it is definitely a B-movie that never expected to be talked about some seventy years after it first appeared on screens. And Peter Lorre is in it for less than ten minutes. He’s great, and there is a pretty cool dream sequence in the middle, but other than that it is kind of dull. Anyway, you can read my full review here.