Gefangene Frauen

I'd love to write a little summary of this movie's plot, but...there simply isn't one! If you just take a look at the plot keywords for this title, you pretty much know the entire content of the film: sex, breasts, exploitation, female frontal nudity and women's prison! 80 minutes of pure sleaze and nothing more. "Escape of the Island Women" (an alternate title that isn't even listed here) clearly wanted to become another notorious and controversial woman-in-prison classic, but it totally lacks the brutality of one. WIP-flicks are meant to blend graphic sexual images with shocking violence, but the violence here has just been replaced with more sex. Director Erwin Dietrich surely can't compete with specialists in the field, like Jess Franco or Joe D'Amato, and he should have sticked to making ordinary soft-core flicks. The only aspects that slightly look like cult-cinema are the resemblance of the tyrant-president with Fidel Castro and the group-rape of a (minor?) girl by soldiers. The girls are ravishing, though, and the Ibiza filming location looks very enchanting.

Yes it is trashy...but the women in this movie are delightful. They pulled alot out of a z movie budget. Great colors, back drops and the framing was good. I would take this type of movie over any modern block borester movie any day. I mean a nude woman pushing a wheel barrow full of rocks....that action!

Put them all together: Erwin Dietrich behind the camera, Brigitte Lahaie and a whole bunch of gorgeous, very naked women in front of the camera, keep the nudity and hot scenes going from beginning to end, and you've got a winner. Storyline?... who cares! Okay, okay... a bunch of beautiful girls are kidnapped from a bordello by a paramilitary force (yikes!) and taken to a deserted island to be held as sex slaves. That's the bad news. The good news is they don't suffer much at all, and they are nude most of the time. Basically the same cast from "Come Play With Me" (another wonderful Erwin Dietrich romp) with a bunch of welcomed additions. Fans of '70s Euro sleaze will definitely enjoy this one.

Much like Tinto Brass ("Caligula"), the people who made this movie can't tell the difference between explicitness and eroticism. No build-up at all, just throw naked women on the screen; no, it doesn't work that way. If close-ups of female genitalia aren't your thing, prepare to be looking away from the screen at many points (I often did). The "all women are whores at heart" mentality of the movie is offensive, and the "story" is by turns absurd and boring (the escape is the most boring part!). But halfway through there is a random scene that pops out of nowhere and involves one of the (female) prisoners and one of the (male) guards in a nude wrestling match, which she wins with a couple of judo moves. Although the choreography of the fight is bad, the whole scene is undeniably memorable. In fact, that scene and the nice cinematography are the only two reasons I give this film * out of 4, instead of 0.

I've come to realise through watching this sort of film that I don't like them very much. Caged Women is yet another 'women in prison' film, and like the most of the rest of the genre; the plot is completely forsaken in favour of simply showing nude women. Now don't get me wrong; I love nude women, but I also like there to be some sort of plot thread to go with the nudity, and since this film has only the basic 'women are in prison' theme running through it (aswell as the essential escape, of course), I got a bit bored before the end. The film is good because there's barely a moment in it where the women are wearing clothes, but that's about the only positive element. Director (and writer, ha ha) Erwin C. Dietrich delights in showing close-ups of the naked female body, but it's never very erotic. The director was the producer on a number of trash flicks, including some directed by Jess Franco. In my opinion, he should stick to producing as his writing talents are non-existent, and he doesn't seem to know how to film a sex scene. This sort of material is rather dry a lot of the time, but I reckon Franco could have made more out of it. Overall, this might suffice for people that are really into this sort of stuff; but I can't say I enjoyed it.