It's kind of bland. I'd expected to be more shocked by a Daisuke Yamanouchi Female Loan Shark movie, but this one's a sequel to a 2017 one I haven't seen and it wants a happy ending. I can understand that. It's the same thing Yamanouchi did with his second Space-Time Perverted Virgin. If you want to know what happens next to some characters, you don't want the answer to be "horror and despair". (LATER: I'm wrong, this isn't Daisuke Yamanouchi's second film about Chizuru. It's at least his fourth, after two hostess club films: The Game of Jou-Ou (2014) and The New Game of Jou-Ou: The Legendary Woman Returns (2016).)

The opening's extreme. A survivor of the previous film (Shijimi with grotesque facial injuries, a metal plate and a platinum wig) explains how she was tortured, then enslaved by her torturer for eighteen months. Another girl was unluckier. "I couldn't believe so much blood could come from one human body. There was only a head left at the end." These days, Shijimi is a cheerful, disturbing idiot who enjoys torturing herself with hot wires. She's working as a call girl, has become slightly less illiterate and is again unwisely borrowing money from our anti-heroine Chizuru.

This film's not interested in horror. Chizuru's clients get off lightly and the person who gets in trouble the most is actually her employee, played by the engaging and rather good Ken Nojiri. (I'm surprised he hasn't been in more films.) His character worked in a host club and is a charming smooth talker, but has a habit of getting in somewhat implausible trouble with female clients. That tends to involve that yakuza who's nearly Ichi the Killer's Kakihara and is also in the Space-Time Perverted Virgin films. Same facial scarring, same actor. Do Daisuke Yamanouchi's films exist in a shared universe? He certainly likes reusing actors.

This narrative's backstory-heavy. Chizuru (Iori Kogawa) once had a bloke she loved and she was trying to protect him when she became a loan shark for the yakuza. Similarly, Ken Nojiri has had terrible luck and only started working for Chizuru because of yakuza-related trouble.

The current story, in contrast, is... okay. I don't mind Chizuru's happy ending, but I wasn't gripped and even the sleaze sometimes got boring. She has disinterested sex with yakuza bosses and gets asked to work as a dominatrix again.

The most startling things here are reminders of other films, e.g. Shijimi's throwaway flashback, or the multi-voltage murder device from the "electrodes on your nipples" torture scene in Kyoko Maki's film. (It's not used here, but we see it in the room of a yakuza who'd been present in that scene too.) As for this film itself... well, it's often a mistake to watch a sequel without having seen the original first. (I looked for the first one, admittedly, but couldn't find it.) I'm sure having watched that would have given this sequel more emotional resonance. I'd have liked it better. The film's not bad and I don't mind it, but it's a bit underdone for this Female Loan Shark series.