After the sordid Prisoner 701 chose to bury its feminist morality under layers and layers of sleaze, the producers (with considerable input from Lady Scorpion herself, Meiko Kaji) went back to the drawing board for a much different approach. Jailhouse 41 picks up right where we left off; Scorpion’s in solitary after breaking out for the attempted murder of her duplicitous ex-beau, a corrupt police officer. Sure, that’s a slap in the face to authority, but the warden’s more pissed off about his missing right eyeball. If you really must know the convoluted events that led to said injury, you can consult the preceding entry in this series, but Jailhouse 41 doesn’t waste any time in re-establishing these conflicts. We don’t even have time for a title sequence before we’re thrown into the thick of things. There is, however, a cheeky Coen-esque title card that assures us the film is a work of fiction.

This was actually my introduction to the series, and I’d heartily recommend any Lady Scorpion neophytes skip the first chapter and go directly to this one. It’s hardly an intellectual challenge: Warden hates Scorpion, Scorpion silently endures whatever punishments he devises to “break her spirit”. Same as the first, only without lengthy scenes of degradation; Jailhouse 41 opts for an artsy, tasteful approach to female trauma. An early scene where she’s raped by a gang of loathsome guards wearing stockings over their face is horrifying not for the act in question, rather for the POV shot of the men surrounding her while screaming obscenities. Suddenly, all the sound cuts out and we adopt the distant perspective shared by her and the warden.

Whereas Prisoner 701 looked and felt exactly like the cheap Women in Prison pinky programmer it was meant to be, Jailhouse 41 does not linger within the walls of its titular concrete compound. By the end of the first reel, we already deeply despise the guards, and then come the bitchy fellow prisoners who correctly blame Scorpion for the ridiculous punishments they must also endure. Oba, the craziest one of all, seems to loathe our heroine with an otherworldly passion; perhaps she’s trying to overcompensate for her Sapphic desires? At any rate, the two rivals forge an immediate codependency after Oba assists Scorpion in breaking out of the police van. Natch, our Lady must strike the first blow with a kill later ripped off by Anton Chigurh, getting a bit of bloody satisfaction while bolstering the spirits of her sisters at the same time.

From there, the ladies lay waste to the van and begin their sprawling odyssey of castration mania, working their way through the countryside with the cops hot on their heels. In an interesting contrast, the violence against women is depicted as artistically as possible, whereas their blood-soaked revenge against those with Y chromosomes is almost uncomfortably graphic. Witness the fate of that poor fellow illuminated with brilliant blue light in the distance.

There’s no need to squint to make out what happened, the camera helpfully zooms in until you’re well aware of his fate, smashed testicles and all. Yet, in view of prior oppression, this could be seen as an entirely just punishment. Our band of escaped convicts carry untold amounts of sympathy yet we should never condone their actions. They’re all evil to the bone, even Lady Scorpion herself, and would turn on one another if they weren’t all codependent partners in Womanhood. When the girls stumble into a derelict shack late one afternoon for shelter, they’re greeted by the old lady of the house and given dinner. Then we in the audience are given a psychedelic Noh performance, with the mystical old maid chanting the crimes (of passion) committed by each woman in turn, recounting the acts of violence that led to their respective imprisonments. Save for Lady Scorpion, who remains a delightful enigma.

From there it just gets weirder and weirder.

Make no mistake: Jailhouse 41 is as obviously acid-influenced as Yellow Submarine or The Holy Mountain; those expecting more Prisoner 701 antics will be disappointed to find no clever usage of work lights or golf clubs, likewise for the marked lack of nudity or degradation. Logic does not come into play at any point, and all scenes with the cops are kept as short and jargon-free as possible. The colorful aesthetic, influenced by the work of Seijun Suzuki, delivers eye-popping compositions in every scene, and the epic sweep of the story gives this low-budget production a kind of grandeur not befitting of its Women in Prison trappings. Likewise the characters are more archetypal than three-dimensional, none more so than our heroine. She only speaks one line in the whole film.

Surprisingly, presumed villainess Oba is given the most development. After we learn she killed her husband and children in cold blood, she then pulls up her robe to expose the jagged scar left over from her DIY hysterectomy. Then this self-loathing female starts laughing hysterically. It’s a chilling scene that brings to light some of the subtext of the story; Jailhouse 41 deals with the burden of womanhood and explores gender politics, albeit in a simplistic manner. All the male characters are either disgusting horndogs or figures of fascist tyranny, set up to be appropriately punished by Lady Scorpion, self-appointed defender of oppressed women. If the symbolism is at times crashingly obvious (an act of sexual violence is represented by a yonic waterfall gushing red water) the cinematography and art direction are so stunning you won’t really care.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, as the old axiom says, and Jailhouse 41 proves it beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt. Its juxtaposition of female empowerment and moral ambiguity lends some food for thought, but you sure as hell won’t have much time to mull over these things as the film rockets forward at an incredible pace, leading to a bus hijacking/hostage crisis/seige and a memorable scene in a landfill. Hallucinatory madness clashes with gritty authenticity in most every scene, giving the film a unique atmosphere of heightened reality. Even after most of the conflict works itself out, there’s still time for a side order of badass revenge; Lady Scorpion shows up dressed to kill with her sharpened phallus at the ready, paradoxically dooming herself by exacting punishment.

…And she looks great doing it. I have no idea why Jailhouse 41 isn’t more highly regarded; it transcends the whole scuzzy “pinky violence” subgenre and leaves other Women In Prison cheapies in the dust. With the sequel, Beast Stable, the psychedelic approach was abandoned in favor of an aesthetic owing more to Kinji Fukasaku, so this film is even more of an oddity. See it with the woman you love, especially if you’re a woman yourself.

Psychological and physical horror are fused seamlessly in the grueling Antichrist, which is either a treatise against new-age therapy or a tragedy of Greek proportions. However you choose to interpret the story of an archetypal couple coping with the grief caused by the accidental death of their child (the incident is depicted in black and white with high speed photography evoking the credit sequence in Tarsem’s The Fall, but with much more graphic sexual imagery), Antichrist will make your skin crawl.

After disposing of his wife’s medication, psychologist Willem Dafoe decides to use her as a guinea pig for a series of “grief therapy sessions”, which soon reveal themselves as nothing more than primal struggles for dominance set against a swath of untamed wilderness. Banal activities, such as piggyback rides or bridge crossings, are given great metaphorical importance in the eyes of the therapist. Each and every task must be some sort of test, with Dafoe providing additional obstacles in the form of arbitrary rules. When things are not done exactly as instructed, the “game” resets. Understandably this does more to exacerbate pre-existing problems than anything else.

Charlotte Gainsbourg does phenomenal work as the wife, who is an intriguing mix of victim and antagonist. Likewise, the psychologist could be seen as a good guy “thinking outside the box”, motivated by nothing more than love for his wife. While Dafoe remains a cool blank slate through most of the film, Gainsbourg must go through an entire heightened process of grief, dealing with the ugly flip side of her maternal instincts.

Passive aggressive mental torture rules the first half of the film; Lars von Trier seems to identify more with the grieving mother of the dead young ‘un, as her husband does nothing but spout cliches and Psych 101 jargon. As they’re a good day’s hike away from civilization, escape isn’t a viable option. So she begins to trip out, vacillating wildly between anxiety, suicidal mania and hypersexuality. Dafoe responds by becoming even more detached from the relationship: “You can’t screw your therapist!”

What was once a normal marriage deteriorates into a power struggle, with the grieving mother hoping to achieve her salvation through sex, and the smug, sexless PhD who thinks he can boil every brain fart down to an exact scientific cause and effect. The conflict is rich in emotional extremity, and fosters an extremely tense atmosphere; the insane guilt-triggered animal hallucinations hardly seem necessary, but they help Antichrist achieve an inhuman level of intensity.

Hallucinations and flashbacks, usually preluded by a slow zoom into the back of their respective character’s head, are done with a wide variety of film stocks and speeds and often quite disgusting. Images of stillborn deer, baby birds consumed by ants and decapitated by roving eagles, a fox tearing at its own gaping stomach wound. Coupled with some really bass-intensive ambient sound, these scenes are otherworldly and immersive despite the repulsive imagery. Plus you’ve gotta love it when the fox opens its maw and says “Chaos reigns!” to signal the end of that particular chapter.

Nature itself is a palpable aggressor, preferring not to talk most of the time. Acorns fall on the tin roof of their forest shack, making it impossible to sleep. There are those damn talking foxes and miscarrying does wandering around the cabin. A dramatic climax occurs during a hail storm, creating a wall of atonal noise to create yet another schism between the warring sexes. Then there’s the nature of man as a sexual being, which ties into a layer of guilt that sends poor Charlotte over the brink, and puts Willem through more hell than when he played the “Real Christ” for Scorsese 20 years ago. The Herculean trials that await Mr. Dafoe make Monica Bellucci’s tunnel scene in Irreversible look like a lazy Sunday stroll. His fearless performance washes clean any trace of the septic reek of The Boondock Saints.

Many self-respecting critics couldn’t seem to handle the graphic violence and stomach turning twists that await the curious viewer, and so took it upon themselves to ruin every last detail. Since I was aware of all the unpleasant occurrences of Act 3, it had a lot less impact than a cold viewing would have. It’s still horrifying nonetheless, and the only logical termination of the self-fulfilling prophecy of their DIY couples therapy. Never has transfer of anxiety been so literal, or so brutally visualized. Antichrist is deeply painful, disturbing on several levels, and also technically flawless. See it on a big screen with the loudest sound system possible.

The Wayward Cloud is a strange, strange, strange film. Perhaps the strangest thing about The Wayward Cloud is that it was a huge hit in Taiwan, grossing $20 million when the average film in the country makes under a million. When you see the film’s poster with a girl tongue kissing a watermelon, it is understandable to think “I’ll pass,” but in this case you would be missing out.

As best I can describe, The Wayward Cloud is about two neighbors who live in an apartment building in Taiwan during a water shortage in an unusually hot summer. A woman named Shiang-chyi Chen sits around her apartment eating watermelon, while her next door neighbor Kang-sheng Lee makes hardcore porn films (which in the opening scene involve a watermelon between a woman’s legs).

The Wayward Cloud is mostly minimalist and truly beautiful in its austere compositions and delicate urban electric light; the motif of shadows and silhouettes are repeated to gorgeous effects. This shadows and silhouettes are interspersed with scenes of graphic sex, albeit no more explicit than you would see in Crash, Short Bus, or WR: Mysteries of the Organism. The same long takes which lingered on an empty hallway now assume the position of Peeping Tom.

The detached view of sexuality would seem indebted to films like Crash and Salo where the body is reduced to a writhing mindless thing with genitals. This perspective becomes especially apparent in the last scene, where a women is unconscious/dead (there is some debate between whether this porn actress is dead or passed out from heat exhaustion), but the show must go on, and the crew literally props her up in a variety of positions so the Lee can have sex with her. These antics are all witnessed by Chen, who eventually figures out what Lee does for a living after finding one of his porn starlets passed out in a elevator.

The flirting and relationship between Chen and Lee are the emotional heart of the film, symbolized by the repeated images of watermelon and bottled water. Chen is often scene rubbing water on her arms while alone, juxtaposed with images of Lee covered in his and someone else’s sweat. Chen and Lee even share an homage to Annie Hall, giddily picking up crabs from the kitchen floor. And they laugh, and they love, and the film swerves back and forth between their two perspectives, meeting in an occasional musical number.

That’s right. The Wayward Cloud is a musical. There are about 5 or 6 full-on musical numbers, not merely spontaneous karaoke affairs like Happiness Of The Katakari’s, but at the level of Singin’ In The Rain Hollywood show-stoppers. In one musical sequence, a character becomes a merman and serenades the moon from a water tower. In yet another scene, Alice in Wonderland like giant flowers appear around the statue of a Taiwanese politician. In one scene, where Lee is having some trouble getting it up, there is a song where a man wearing a life-size penis-suit is surrounded by dancing girls wearing plastic buckets on their heads, all set in a public restroom. I can’t stress enough how genuinely fantastic (from a technical film standpoint) and absurdly incredible these scenes are.

The songs themselves are assorted 60s and modern soul and folk sounds from Taiwan, and are all unique and lovely in their own right. Weird as all this sounds, The Wayward Cloud comes together in a smashingly perverse, erotic, socially critical, and emotionally devastating climax, the sort you might find in a Lars Von Trier film at his most crafty in such films as The Idiots or Dogville.

Goodbye Dragon Inn, Ming Ling Tsai’s previous directorial effort, was so rigid in never moving its cameras and keeping its characters in the dark, that the film was distracted from how formally inventive and cinematically fresh the whole premise was. The Wayward Cloud has no such difficulties, getting its vitality up and keeping it up. The film veers between the common and the theatrical so organically that the musical sequence always seem natural, as do the money shots which flow into images of watermelons floating down a river.

As for what The Wayward Cloud means, I would say it’s a love story. The two lead characters, I later read, were in a previous Ming-liang Tsia’s film called, What Time Is It There?. In a sense, The Wayward Cloud is their “Before Sunset” second chance at love. It would have been simple for Ming-liang Tsia to make a moody little film about an alienated women infatuated with an alienated man, which is basically what The Wayward Cloud is about. However, Miang Liang imbues this common premise with a wild cinematic spirit, employing crisp editing, colorful cinematography, MUSIC, and subdued/wildly theatrical performances that becomes transcendent of the films run-of-the-mill social yearnings for genuine connection in the cold, cruel world. I can’t think of any film as repulsive, arousing, beautiful, fun, and sad as The Wayward Cloud, at least not with all those gears running at once like they are here.

In a way, I thought The Wayward Cloud had a happy ending. The couple gets together, right? No more lifeless proxy sex with sleeping girls and emotional amateur porn, and no more isolated peeking around the corner from what we desire while waiting for the water (life’s lubricant) to return. I don’t know, maybe I’m all wrong, but I believe our heroine’s tears are from a place of even deeper sadness. Or maybe their courtship was so convincing and extraordinarily arranged that I was rooting for the couple to get together, regardless of their strange and horrible acts.

Only one thing is for certain. The watermelon has lost its innocence in the fruit kingdom. Thanks to The Wayward Cloud, this fruit, along with the banana and kumquat, must now be placed behind the beaded curtain in the adults only section of the produce aisle.