Im Knast der perversen Mädchen

70s Euro-sleaze movie, Jailbirds, features loads of nekkidness, a good deal of perversity, and a little violence, making it a reasonable way to while away the time if you're into exploitation flicks.

This sexy slice of shock cinema sees four tough female prison escapees hijack a bus-load of nubile tennis players (along with the driver and tennis coach) and hold them hostage in a large country villa, owned by a judge. The four fugitives spend their time harassing the judge and sexually abusing the prisoners (one of the crims is a full-on lezza, whilst another is a nympho who has her eye on the 'hunky' bus driver), until the inevitable showdown with the police interrupts their partying.

Jailbirds doesn't hold back on the T&A (with practically everyone getting their kit off to some degree) and features several raunchy sex scenes. Even the seemingly upright judge throws caution to the wind and, in one particularly unbelievable moment, rapes the (admittedly rather tasty) leader of the lawbreakers to teach her a lesson.

The story is no classic, and the movie is unlikely to blow you away with its technical merits or Oscar-worthy acting, but fans of movie trash should still have a fairly fun time with this deplorable (in a good way) little treat.

"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).

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.

The plot outline for this film promised so much, a group of French/Italian (its difficult to tell) female prisoners break out of their prison, and set out on the run, killing a few police officers and kidnapping a bus load of young tennis players, this seems a perfect setting for an "erotic thriller", but as is to be expected from a very low budget European film from the late seventies, the film fails to live up to any of this potential. This film is a laughable, poorly dubbed, appallingly edited story which tries to be intelligent, managing to achieve the seemingly impossible combination of pretentiousness and stupidity. The film has few redeeming features, but the main one is that it is quite a good laugh to watch with a few mates when drunk, especially at the hilarious musical score and the cheap and nasty production values, (at one point it actually switches from widescreen to normal, then back to widescreen a few minutes later). If you wanted you could probably kid yourself into thinking this was an art-house film since its foreign and attempts to deal with "issues" in societies, which it does rather clumsily, otherwise just watch it and laugh.

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.