Random Movie Project: 'Women's Penitentiary XII'

This was the first time (surely not the last) where I was a little hesitant to rent the title which the Gods of randomization have bestowed upon me. The page I was to go to open was near the end of the catalog, so I knew it would be somewhere in the W-Z range. My heart sank as I saw that every title on my designated page began with the word "women." It sank further when my designated line number held the title "Women's Penitentiary XII."



99 Women (1969)
Dir: Jess Franco
Story: Jess Franco, Milo G. Cuccia and Carlo Fadda





Summary:

Three women on a rowboat arrive to Castillo de los Muerte (Castle of Death) on a prisoner's island led by the evil, emperor-like Governor Santos (Herbert Lom), and an even eviler butch warden, Thelma Diaz (Mercedes McCambridge). These women have led lives of sin, prostitution, drug addiction, murder and general waywardness. One of them is innocent, but cannot escape the trials of prison life. After Leonie Caroll (Maria Schell), a sympathetic government official, comes to inspect the prison, she intervenes by making life easier on the inmates, much to the behest of the disciplinarian, Diaz. With this newfound leniency, three women attempt to escape with the help of a lover/inmate from the men's ward, but things are never as easy as they seem.

99 Women, it seems, has undergone many, many editions - including the tape I rented which was labeled "Women's Penitentiary XII." Apparently, "Women's Penitentiary" was a franchise which had success on VHS. I guess some company bought the distribution rights to this movie and included it in their women-in-prison "collection." 99 Women was never a sequel in any series of chick prison movies. Other editions include an X-rated French version which had hardcore lesbo-erotic shots inserted years after the original film's production. Director Jess Franco is said to have largely disowned that version. Seems he wanted his women-in-prison flick to remain a respectable one.

Impressions:

Icky. This movie had an air of ickiness all over it. That's not to say that in an icky, exploitative way, it wasn't well made, because it kinda' was, if you can ignore the fact that nearly every interior seems to have been lit with one solitary light. But even with all the nice, scenic Brazilian exteriors and the Spanish and Italian architecture it features, the movie still mainly consisted of scenes of blurry lesbian encounters, rape, catfights, face smacking, hair-pulling, camera zooming, catfights, blurry what-nots and rape. There wasn't a whole lot more to this one. In an attempt to make the dialog as irritating as possible, the screenwriter saw fit to have all the characters repeat the same lines over and over:

"On the other side of the island, there's a fishing village... with boats!"

"She has committed repeated insolence!"

"Zis eez a place of punishment for crimes against zee laws of society!"

Oh, and one more thing - the actress who played the bull-dyke warden was also the voice of the possessed Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist.