Im Knast der perversen Mädchen

Used to see these type of films from Italian cinema in the 70s so thought I'd give it a try. Watched this on Amazon Prime, big mistake, reduced to 56mins, should have realised then. All the nudity and some violence had been cut out, wasn't even done coherently, story appeared to jump all over the place. Might have been better with Italian dialogue and English subtitles. Will be wary about watching others of this genre from Italy. Strange as a Deborah Wiseman's film from the 60s at a nudist resort, a crime thriller, didn't appear edited at all, lots of nudity, not full frontal, also on Amazon Prime.

This is one grubby little flick with four girl prison escapees hijacking a coach load of female tennis players. Lilli Carati (The Alcove and To Be Twenty) stars and is lovely throughout whilst seemingly everyone in the film, takes their clothes off at some point, even the judge who rapes the star! Lots of running about and fighting plus the aforementioned undressing to keep the interest but whilst the pseudo intellectual political chat may have seemed 'right on' in 1978 it is a real embarrassment now. We get the odd twist and turn but really it is all rather predictable and it only just manages to keep going.

This movie has kind of a bad reputation, largely because people expect it to be an American WIP movie (it was released on video in a double bill with "Sweet Sugar") when really it is an Italian "terror film" along the lines of "Late Night Trains", "The Last House on the Beach", and the notorious "House by the Edge of the Park". These films, inspired by the seminal American horror movie "Last House on the Left", typically involve often young and always comfortably middle-class protagonists being held captive and/or terrorized by lower-class miscreants until they find the strength to fight back, often proving even more vicious than their tormentors. This film is an interesting variation on this in that the captives are a girls' tennis team being held in a judge's isolated villa and the tormentors are four escaped female convicts. And while some elements, like the Marxist terrorist leader of the gang, may seem strange to the terminal Americans out there, you have to remember this movie was made in Europe in the 1970's when the Bader-Meinhoff cells in Germany and Red Army cells in Italy were still running loose.

This movie is actually somewhat realistic with decent character development and pretty good acting (especially considering that two of the leads, Lili Karati and Dirce Funari, would later move to hardcore sex films, and two others, Zora Kerova and Marina D'Ania, were usually reduced to piece-of-tail supporting roles in the more vile Italian cannibal and Nazi prison camp flicks). It does, of course, have to make the standard nods to the demands of sexploitation--most of the female cast have (usually pretty gratuitous)nude scenes and there is a whole variety of ridiculous rape scenes--man by woman, woman by woman, the female Marxist terrorist by a bourgeois judge (the latter is either incisive political commentary or a sorry excuse to get the luscious Lili Karati naked again). On the other hand, this movie is nowhere near as violent or harrowing as many films of it's kind (it's a Disney film compared to "House by the Edge of the Park"). It's kind of like "Terror Express" with its over-the-top sexscapades, but more realistic with a nice cynical ending. It's a decent movie if you know what you're in for, even though it will probably disappoint American WIP fans.

Wow! What a great movie! Why has nobody heard of this one? It was released as a double bill tape with SWEET SUGAR, but the tape doesn't contain any credits for the film besides the title. It does seem to be an Italian release, but I'm not sure whether it was made in 1974, though: there's a reference in the film to one of the characters being in prison since 1975. Maybe it was dubbed into English after 1975. Who knows?

This is one taut, zippy (70 minutes) and surprisingly political thriller, with enough sex, nudity, lesbianism, rape, violence and murder to please any exploitation fan. The movie begins with a gang of sex starved Communist revolutionaries on the run from a prison break. They hijack a bus load of nubile tennis players and hold them hostage at a mansion owned by the bourgeois capitalist judge who put the girls away in the first place. Amazing stuff. Rent it now!

"ESCAPE" is a wonderful film from the land that time forgot. Actually it's pretty much a cut-rate exploitation movie, but it's got a lot going for it: sex, violence, some pretty hilarious dialouge, and a busload of nubile tennis players. throw a terrorist, a judge, a nymphomaniac, a lesbian prostitute, and a woman who is obsessed with food and you have the ultimate party movie. Actually, your friends will probably hate it, but for you undiscriminate types out there (and you know who you are) search out this gem before it becomes extinct. Originally on a double feature tape with "Sweet Sugar" at a running time of 70 min. I have the original uncut version at 100 min. (get this one).