This is harrowing. Directed by Jess Franco, it caused a certain degree of controversy by the inclusion in the cast of Susan Hemingway as Maria, an apparently underage actress (a young looking 16 year old). It is as bleak and uncompromising ... and dangerous ... a film as Franco ever directed.
Produced with collaborator Erwin C. Dietrich, this is deliberately gratuitous on many levels. A women in prison peril drama, it features Howard Vernon in one of the most disturbing of his roles: sleazy, dishevelled, perverted Dr. Milton who, even through the gauze of dubbing, still permeates the horrifying persona of someone who really enjoys inflicting many forms of torture ("The last men I did this to became homosexual," he says at one point, whatever that might imply).
Franco is quite restrained here in his camerawork at least, allowing the many scenes of humiliation and inflicted pain to speak for themselves without a frantically zooming lens to highlight a particular horror. What blood and actual gore we do see - with admittedly gaudy red paint - is only partially and briefly glimpsed and therefore powerful indeed; if even the camera daren't linger on the wounds, how can we, the audience?
Films like this, I'd say, more than his more straightforward horror output, earned Franco a reputation as exploitation-ist. As ever, the soundtrack (by Walter Baumgartner here) is glaringly inappropriate. A light jazzy percussive piece, for example, accompanies scenes of the female prisoners trying to seduce their prison guard (including Hemmingway's Maria, of course: "You can have all four of us," she says at one point) by indulging in lesbian foreplay.
Also known as 'Escape from the Island of Death', 'Tropical Inferno' and originally 'Frauen für Zellenblock 9', this is probably not the best Franco film to show to someone unfamiliar with his work. Often when I watch one of his films, I recognise entirely the technical flaws, the bad dubbing, incomprehensible stories and love them anyway. Here, it is the uncompromising exploitation elements that makes me wince a little, in that we are watching nubile, naked young women continually placed in graphic, often sexual, peril.
French Karine Gambier, who has a prolific acting filmography, is excellent as the stoical Karine (and has a look of Jean Rollin's Castel twins about her); Dora Doll is also very effective as governess Loba. The locations, which Franco always excels at photographing, are either tremendously austere for the prison scenes, or idyllic as befits the sprawling surrounding jungle. The characters are typically under-written and exist purely for the purposes of this film (if we knew a little more about them and saw some semblance of personality - although dubbing strangles this - then we would care more for their plight on a personal level) - but Franco isn't interested in backstory.
As an aside, two years earlier, Hammer released one of their final films, 'To the Devil a Daughter', which featured Nastassia Kinski who was reportedly only 14 when her naked scenes were shot, two years younger than Susan Hemingway, and yet the usually prudish British censors seemed happy to let this go without comment, yet 'Women of Cellblock 9' is still officially banned in the UK.
