Dangereuse Humiliation

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.

I saw this film on cable recently and remembered how bad it was the first time I saw it.

The story is about female delinquents locked up in an English borstal in the early eighties.

This film blatantly 'borrows' from the film Scum with Ray Winstone and I mean blatant - there's the cut-wrist suicide from one of the more unstable inmates, the hard-nut - Eddie (who replaces Scum's Ray Winstone), and the scene where an attack is made in a deserted part of the compound with a steel bar - Scrubbers version features a slow-motion sequence which is obviously faked!

The only reasons for watching this garbage is to see early roles from Kathy 'I'm smoking a fag!' Burke from the 'Harry Enfield Show', Robbie Coltrane and 'Pat' from 'Eastenders'. As well as many a naked pair of breasts - which make the movie watchable - just.

Verdict - One for the lads.

Oi Oi savaloy!

Couldn't bear to watch the end of it as got seriously bored with 28 mins to go and couldn't bear to sit through the rest of this drivel.

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.

I saw this expecting the typical WIP exploitation. Unfortunately it is a story told with a bleak reality and stark setting. I also hate to say this, but the girl whose child is in a convent , is so obnoxious that all we wish for is to have ill fall upon her. Yes she is also included in the worst slow motion sequence ever filmed. It looks like the girls were moving slow while filming at normal speed to get the action right then it was going to be sped up to look a vicious beating in real time. Someone forgot yo speed up the sequence and it looks like my kids playing super heroes in the back yard moving in super slo-mo. Actually my kids have better " mad skills". Yet I digress, on with the positive... This is a pretty good movie with solid performances with a few interesting story lines. The most exploitive part is that all the girls are attractive and obviously haggled up for their roles. I gave this a 7 because it was earnest and interesting...it is not " Prison a go go, or reform school girls, but if you want to watch women's OZ, then this is your flick.