I’ve written at length about the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, as they’re some of my favorite movies ever—Beast Stable is one of the best things the human race has made—so I wasn’t really looking forward to seeing a direct-to-video reimagining of the first movie.

Man, I was wrong.

Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji) is — was? — the Scorpion, an unkillable prisoner who did more than get revenge. She is the patron saint of wronged women throughout Japanese prisons, a whispered name that is worshipped and feared.

This begins with an unnamed woman (Natsuki Okamoto) being trapped in hardening concrete before the barrel she’s in falls off a truck, freeing her, before she’s trained by the yakuza to be an assassin, sent to prison and let loose in the catacombs below the cells — the same place Scorpion was in all the way back in Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 — and murder Scorpion to gain revenge for the warden, who lost his eye to the legendary lady’s sharpened spoon.

But can you kill an idea? Or better yet, can you become one? The systems that keep women in prison, that ruin lives, they want Scorpion dead for sure because she inspires people. When the unnamed heroine finds Scorpion, she’s long gone, walled into concrete, but she is holding her spoon as if she died fighting. Except that her hand opens, releasing the spoon into our new heroine’s hand before disappearing. Now, Scorpion is reborn, but more to the point, she can never die.

Directed and written by Toshiharu Ikeda (Mermaid Legend,  Sex Hunter), this movie is about as perfect as a down-and-dirty, low-budget VHS tape can be. How amazing is it that it’s in a perfect Arrow box set, cleaned up and still ready to destroy your brains? I couldn’t love a movie more.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Death Threat is just one of the movies in the Arrow Video V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal set. The set includes a newly filmed introduction by Japanese film critic Masak Tanioka, a video essay by film historian Samm Deighan and a trailer. You can get this from MVD.