Written by Craig J. Nevius and directed by Jonathan Winfrey, this movie was released on the cable channel Showtime in 1995 (although it’s set in 1993) as part of its “Roger Corman Presents” lineup, although I don’t think Corman had much of any actual direct involvement in most of the films in this series.

The action takes place in “Angel City”, and stars Joan Severance as Darcy Walker.  Opening with a flashback to 1975, we see Darcy as a young girl living with her father, a police lieutenant (only ever referred to as Lt. Walker, and played by Rick Rossovich). We’ll learn that Darcy’s mother left them both, due to her dislike of Lt. Walker’s job. But Darcy seems to like learning about her father’s job and spends her free time listening to alerts on the police radio. She asks her father to tell her a bedtime story, and he tells her the fable of The Scorpion And The Frog, which is an odd choice but serves to inspire Darcy’s later scorpion identity, so it serves a narrative purpose.

Hearing an alert on the radio, Lt. Walker rushes out to catch some bank robbers. During a high-speed chase, he shoots out one of the tires in the crooks’ car, making them crash. He then follows as they’re taken to the hospital. At the hospital, the crooks manage to arm themselves and Lt. Walker engages them in a shootout in which he manages to kill them both, but also accidentally kills the doctor (Casey Siemaszko) who was in charge, which results in him being fired from the force.

Flash forward 18 years, Darcy is now a police officer working undercover as a prostitute, along with her partner Michael Russo (Bruce Abbott). The two of them have a bit of a love/hate relationship, which comes to a head during a failed bust of a local pimp, which each of them blames the other for. Darcy meets her father (now working as a security guard) for drinks in a bar, and he gives her a ring with a scorpion design on it for her birthday, then suddenly the local D.A. walks in and shoots her father dead.

This makes no sense to anyone, and the D.A. swears he can’t even remember doing it or why, but Darcy threatens him with a gun while he’s in jail and gets herself suspended for that. Darcy then designs a black leather costume and a mask and takes to the streets to get revenge on the pimp, and ends up killing him by throwing him out of a window. This makes her a target of the police, but after averting a few more crimes, she becomes a hero to the public, dubbed the Black Scorpion by the press.

Garrett Morris plays Argyle, a local chop shop owner whom Darcy had arrested in the past. She enlists his help in fixing up her car, equipping it with various high-tech gadgets which she uses to get around and evade the police.

Michael becomes particularly obsessed with capturing the Black Scorpion. But he’s also attracted to her. One night he takes Darcy to his place for dinner, but when she tries to kiss him he rejects her, and Darcy realizes that it’s because he wants Black Scorpion more than her, although he denies it. But another night as the Black Scorpion she breaks into his apartment and basically rapes him, taking off her costume but keeping her mask on, shocking him with a taser at the moment of climax.

We do get a proper supervillain in this film, in the form of a mysterious man in a black suit of armor calling himself The Breathtaker He’s got some grand plan to take over the city with the use of some special gas he’s stolen which can be used to control people’s minds. It turns out he’s behind the murder of Darcy’s father, which makes this personal. Michael finds out that Darcy is The Black Scorpion, and at first wants to arrest her but agrees to team up with her to defeat the Breathtaker, which they do in an action-packed final act.

The ending is bittersweet. Darcy gets her badge back, and Micheal agrees to keep her secret, but decides he’s going to transfer out of town because he no longer feels like he can trust Darcy. So she uses the last bit of the Breathalizer’s gas to make him forget that she’s The Black Scorpion (a career which she clearly intends to continue), so he’ll stay and remain her partner.

I feel like there are some good ideas here, but it ultimately fails on several levels. First, it’s like this film isn’t certain what kind of movie it wants to be. Is it a straight superhero film? A campy parody of a superhero film? An erotic thriller? It tried to be part of all three genres and therefore felt disjointed. And the biggest problem, I hate to say it, is the lead. Joan Severance is a good actress, but she just never felt believable as either a cop or a superhero. There’s a scene where she’s in her apartment punching and kicking a large punching bag, and it’s just so unconvincing. You can tell she’s never been in a fight in her life. She is attractive, and she and Bruce Abbott had excellent chemistry together, so if they’d leaned into her sex appeal, and made this a softcore film, it may have worked better, but for a serious superhero movie, she was just woefully miscast.

But Garrett Morris was a delight in his role. Some other standouts are Terri J. Vaughn as a prostitute named “Tender Lovin'”, whom Darcy befriends, Darryl M. Bell as the evil pimp E.Z. Street, and Stephen Lee as Darcy’s police captain.

The Black Scorpion is a film with a lot of potential that it just never lived up to. Chacebook rating: THREE STARS

Jason Majercik is selling this R-RATED DVD for $19.99. Email him at quinn_nash@hotmail.com for his softcore inventory list