Black Scorpion Reviews

The heroine of this 1995 "Roger Corman Presents" Showtime movie--the direct-to-video goddess Joan Severance--wears a black bustier, spike-heel thigh-high boots, a mask, and practically nothing else. This could very well have been the entire pitch that got this movie made. If that is all you're looking for, then BLACK SCORPION more than delivers. Eighteen years after her police lieutenant father, Stan Walker (Rick Rossovich), accidentally kills a doctor, Darcy (Severance) has become a police detective. With her partner, Michael Russo (Bruce Abbott), they bust a killer pimp, E-Z Street, whom DA Thomas Aldridge (John Sanderford) lets off on a technicality. Later, Aldridge kills ex-Lt. Walker while he and Darcy commiserate in a bar. At the headquarters of BREATH (Bureau of Research and Engineering in Atmospheric Technologies for Health), an unnamed villain seems pleased by the TV news report. When Darcy subsequently threatens the "temporarily insane" Aldridge in his cell, she's suspended from the force. Meanwhile, Tender Lovin, one of E-Z Street's prostitutes whom Darcy promised to help, gets cut up by the angry pimp. After Tender Lovin shows up at Darcy's apartment to blame her, Darcy straps on her sexy superhero outfit and goes off to met out justice. She confronts Easy Street, and kicks him out a window to his death. Later, she saves Tender Lovin from a mugger, and the hooker describes the vigilante as looking like a black scorpion. The Black Scorpion fights crime, but the police want to stop her vigilantism--especially Russo, who wrestles with her one night in a clinch that ends with a kiss before she escapes. This causes complications when Darcy (as herself) wants to get romantic with Russo, because he now has a thing for the Black Scorpion. Later, after the two separately fight the villain, dubbed Breathtaker, the Black Scorpion arrives to throw Russo on his bed and have her way with him. The Black Scorpion eventually defeats Breathtaker--discovering he's the doctor whom her father had apparently killed 18 years ago--and Russo discovers her real identity. But he soon forgets (thanks to a complicated sub-plot), and Darcy is reinstated into the force. The "mood" of the film swerves from straight-forward police noir themes to cartoony superhero action. Given the hackneyed dialogue, and Severance's wooden delivery of it, the best thing about this film just might be its beautifully haunting theme music. However, the film does have one brilliant touch: that comic-book-fanboy dream of seeing Supergirl strip off her top and mount her man. Otherwise, the only breathtaking thing about BLACK SCORPION is the physique of its super-hero lead. (Nudity, graphic violence, sexual situations.)