Blackout im Höllenparadies

Just reminds me a bit of bad girls but squashed into a film so it doesn't really make sense.

Passed about of time so I can't complain as I've saw worse and am subjected to worse on a nightly basis with soaps.

Probably wouldn't watch it again.

You may be expecting this to be Scum, but for women. You've rented the wrong movie. I had a few hangups with this one. For most of the part I was really trying to make sense of the film. I really expected this to be heavy, scary, full on, but No. Even the top dog, who ends up leaving the joint, isn't really bad, probably a little bad in the discreet way. The plot has two girls escaping, one, a bi mother who wants to collect her baby who's been taken from her, and the other girl, Carol, her lesbian lover just wants to get caught. When the two end back in the clink, the bi mother later, the story kind of becomes like in Bad Boys, where the bi mother is p..ed off at Carol, who thinks she dobbed her in, but it's Carol who then becomes pi..ed off because her returned cellmate has shacked up with a new bird. Funny as it's gonna sound, the high point of this film, is that prisoner's singing where she just won't shut up. You hear her a few times, through the film. Scrubbers is depressing, yes, but it just falls short on a lot of things. It's a too ordinary film, a big problem here, where it's plot has started from anywhere, and has left off at the end, as if half story, if you can relate to what I'm finished. It just didn't have a solid discipline of story. Scum stayed with you. This is more forgettable. A scrubber is a term for a low class of English woman.

As everyone seems to have noted SCRUBBERS seems to be nothing more than SCUM made for a female audience . The structures are very similar ( Hardly surprising since SCUM author Roy Minton co-wrote this ) with a relatively thread bare plot getting in the road of episodic incidents . Even the fact that we see British TV stars like Robbie Coltrane ( More or less unrecognisable in a small role ) , Kathy Burke ( As Waynetta Slob ! )and Pat Wicks from EASTENDERS ( Before she met Frank Butcher ) make comparisions with SCUM inevitable

But when all is said and done this a very poor follow up to SCUM mainly because of three reasons

1 ) The poor acting . Despite being a low budget movie the cast of SCUM at least played their parts with intensity especially Ray Winstone . There`s no such acting tour de force here and if memory serves me right much of the acting is plain awful

2 ) There`s no real stand out scene as in SCUM that people discuss like the scene in the greenhouse . There are slightly sickening scenes like the puppet show but they`re unconvincing and seem written in to shock a blase audience . Mind you could say the same with the greenhouse scene in scum so I don`t know if it`s a valid criticism

3 ) What is a valid criticism is that there`s no great lines to qoute in SCRUBBERS . Try discussing SCUM without saying " Where`s yer tool ? " or " I`m the daddy now " or " You want f***in` stripping ? "

A needless and inferior follow up to SCUM probably made to cash in on the success of the 1979 film which became a massive hit on video round about the same time

The lesbian Carol Howden (Amanda York) and the troublemaker Annetta Brady (Chrissie Cotterill) escape from a reformatory for different reasons: Carol wants be arrested again and to go to Borstal, where her girlfriend is imprisoned, and Anneta wants to see her daughter in a foster house. They both are sent to Borstal, a prison for young women, where the whole story takes place. Annetta blames Carol for their new arresting. This English movie has a good performance of the cast. However, the characters are so badly developed that we, viewers, do not know the reasons and the motives why the women are confined in such a place. Their accents are horrible and the story has nothing different or special comparing with other movies of this theme. Watchable and forgettable. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): 'Aonde Nasce o Crime' ('Where The Crime is Born')

Outstanding English-language effort by the great Swedish actor/director Mai Zetterling (anyone who have seen her brilliant Night Games will agree she kicks Bergman's sorry ass!).

Although the video box art tried to sell it off as a cheap Women-In-Prison-exploitation flick, it is really serious stuff. As other commentators have pointed out the film share a lot of similarity with Alan Clarke's grim masterpiece Scum, even sharing the same screenwriter. The main difference is that Scrubbers takes place in an all-women juvenile prison, making it both a great complement to Clarke's film and an interesting study of the differences of the sexes in the patriarchal society. Didn't sound that interesting, did it? Well, it really is when you think about it! For instance, how do the girls behavior to one another differ from the boys? How do girls backgrounds, views of themselves and reason for inprisonment differ? What issues do the girls from Scrubbers lack, that the boys from Scum has to deal with, and vice versa. It's really interesting.

The film is well-acted, well-scripted, thought-provoking and unpleasant. A must-see if you like your movies hard and unembellished. 8/10

NOTE FOR NON-ENGLISH VIEWERS: I saw a non-subtitled copy Scrubbers, and although this usually is no problem for me, in this case I had some trouble understanding parts of the dialouge. My American-born girlfriend had the same problem. Unless you've majored in ugly working-class English, local swearwords or prison-jive I would advise to see a subtitled version.