Les gardiennes du pénitencier

I bought this film thinking it was the 1975 Jess Franco video nasty/women in prison flick 'Women Behind Bars', so I was quite disappointed when I found it wasn't (especially considering that, if it was, I'd now only be left with 'I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses' to see before I've seen everything on the DPP list). Anyway, given my experience of Women in Prison films, I would guess that this film and Franco's Nasty are probably about on par in terms of quality. This one seems to have a bit more of a Nazi theme going on, though as you would probably expect; association with one of the worst genres ever seen in cinema doesn't do this film any favours! The plot is just your usual mix of sadism and torture, this time coupled with an escape plan. It's not intelligent stuff, and it's also rather boring, especially for someone like me who has seen far too many of these films. The film drones on for about eighty five minutes and the ending really isn't worth waiting for. While 'Women Behind Bars' probably isn't any better than this film, I do wish I'd seen that one instead as at least there would have been a point to me watching. There's no point at all in seeing this film so I don't recommend it!

"Women in Prison" and "Nazi-Exploitation" are, hands down, the two absolute most worthless sub genres in horror/cult cinema. I should know because I've seen way too many of them. Apart from a few notable worthwhile classics, like "Chained Heat" and "Ilsa – She Wolf of the SS", all these movies are dull and overly provocative rehashes with the exact same derivative themes and taboos over and over again. Moreover, a lot of these films even shameless copy entire sequences of other films and blatantly paste without even bothering about the fact actors and filming locations look entirely different. That's just downright lame and insulting to your audience. "Jailhouse Wardress" is yet another 100% insignificant and worthless piece of exploitation garbage that plagiarizes no less than three (equally insignificant and worthless) pieces of exploitation garbage. A former Nazi big shot manages to escape to South America near the end of WWII, but he isn't exactly looking to keep a low profile. On a tropical island he becomes the managing director of a women penitentiary where, of course, the inmates are exhibitionist lesbians and the wardens are sadist perverts. There are a handful of potentially interesting story lines, like a plot to assassinate the Nazi and a pretty blonde inmate on a quest for vengeance, but they all lead absolutely nowhere and instead the cameras are more interested in the hideous and overly hairy naked body of a couple of elderly lesbians. The sex sequences are boring beyond words and the efforts to make the villains look purely evil are truly hilarious! A monocle?!? Please! Someone has seen one too many James Bond movies! One to avoid at all costs, but I assume that won't be much of a problem.

For some reason, a friend of mine always picks this movie to watch when he comes over to my place. Even though he readily admits how terrible it is once he thinks about it. It doesn't make much sense at all and even looks awful. I have the X-Rated Kult DVD version, which is fullscreen and comes in a fancy hard clamshell-like case that makes it look like it would be cool, but the case is worth more than the movie. It is called "Women Behind Bars (Frauengefängnis 2)" which is confusing because the artwork is basically the same as the artwork for "Frauengefängnis 3," which might not be a masterpiece, but infinitely more bearable than this movie. There is a DVD from the Netherlands which is actually 1.66:1 (16:9) and may look better because of it, but I doubt looking better helps anyone that has to sit through it. I'm pretty sure that the films put together to make this weren't even the same aspect ratio, so God only knows how the geniuses that put this together intended for it to look or sound.

The movie is actually bits and pieces of a few Women-In-Prison movies glued together to make a new movie. Somebody working for Eurocine thought that it was a good idea for some reason. Cobbling together little pieces of different WIP movies does not make a new "movie." It makes a mess. Kind of like if somebody decided to put little snippets from "Halloween," "Friday the 13th" and "Sleepaway Camp" together to make a new "work of art." Those are all slasher movies (like this is made from women-in-prison movies) but bits and pieces of those movies getting edited together wouldn't make sense. That's exactly how this hodgepodge or horror turned out - like you put a few trashy movies into a blender to see what would happen.

Naziploitation/WIP flic that's almost entirely made up of footage from three other movies; Hitler's Last Train, Captive Women 4 (AKA Elsa: Fraulein SS) and Jess Franco's Caged Women (AKA Barbed Wire Dolls). The 'plot' involves a former SS officer who escapes to 'somewhere in Latin America' where he becomes the manager of a women's prison. Whilst we get a little more of that in the middle, and some at the end, the rest of the movie is spent on how the women are abused by the guards, relationships between the inmates, and their backstories. All these are actually from different movies; some characters' 'flashbacks' don't even feature the same actresses! The titular wardress spends the whole film strutting about wearing a monocle, khaki shirt, and the shortest shorts imaginable, whilst the escaped Nazi spends a lot of time doting on his model soldier collection; not the first bad guy to be shown doing that - except that these are very obviously those all-green molded plastic kids toys that usually come in bags of about 30.

The music in just about every scene is ludicrously inappropriate (funky jazz score during rape, rolling classical piano during a fight between two inmates). And there's a scene that has to be seen to be believed - actually lifted straight from the Franco film; during one flashback we see an inmate fighting-off her uncle (played by Franco himself) who is attempting to rape her. Eventually she pushes him, he strikes his head, and falls to the floor. The whole thing is in slowmotion, EXCEPT... for some unfathomable reason, instead of filming in slowmotion they actually had the actors PERFORM in slowmotion! This 'impactful' scene is literally laughable - especially when the two players start moving at different speeds! Whilst Franco is still slowmo-ing down to the floor (hamming it up for all he's worth) she's running off at normal speed - in the same shot!

As far as genre expectations go there's a lot of full nudity/sex, and a middling amount of violence.

An awful film - but the laughs made it worthwhile. 5/10.

You'll be really scraping the barrel of the Euro-Nazisploitation/Women-In-Prison genres with this film: it's a shoddily edited, and woefully dubbed mess cobbled together from bits of three other movies that are pretty awful in themselves—Jess Franco's Caged Women (1976), Hitler's Last Train (1977) and Captive Women 4 (1977)—and random footage probably salvaged from a Eurocine waste bin.

Unsurprisingly, the script (if, indeed, there was one) makes little-to-no sense but does provide the viewer with some stupefyingly dumb moments that prove marginally entertaining on the 'it's so bad it's funny' level. That really bad 'slow-motion' flashback from Caged Women has to be the weirdest moment, the effect achieved by the actors moving slowly rather than a change in speed of filming, but there are plenty of other 'WTF?' moments, with the following being worthy of a special mention:

1) The governor (Roger Darton) forcing pretty inmate Lola (Nadine Pascal) to write a letter with three different colour pens (how inhumane!). 2) Guard Nestor (Eric Falk) having an inmate repeatedly make her bed (the monster!). 3) The governor's Minnie Mouse teapot. 4) The totally inappropriate music that accompanies the sleaze. 5) The topless guards. 6) The mad woman saying 'I'll just squat' before laying down. 7) The worst 'crosshair' shot in movie history. 8) The repetitive bird whistle. 9) 'Yes, no, yes'. 10) The fight in the sand-pit (they must have had sand in nasty places for days after that).

I rate Jailhouse Wardress a generous 2/10 for the nudity and unintentional laughs.