Scrubbers

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')

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

Caught this years ago at a Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. They showed it along with "Scum" which dealt with the horrors of teenage male prisoners in England. This deals with women in prison.

The film focuses on two women who escape--one (Annetta) wants to visit her baby daughter who is being raised in a convent. The other (Carol) wants to be recaptured and sent to a prison where her girlfriend is. They're both recaptured but Annetta wrongly assumes that Carol ratted on her. Then they're both sent to the same prison and Annetta seeks revenge. It all leads to a depressing ending.

Grim and brutal. There's no humor and no letup in the tension. All the actresses are (pretty obviously) too old to be playing 20 year olds but their acting is so good I was able to ignore it. Worth catching. Trying seeing it with "Scum" which is even more disturbing.

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!

This is a film from the much respected Mai Zetterling and to be honest its clearly not one of her better efforts. We have all seen girls in prison/reform school type of films before and while the gritty atmosphere of the film is effective its still very familiar and bleak. I would have appreciated more of an effort to understand these girls instead of just having the characters put in situations and then watching them react. We know very little or nothing at all about most of these girls. I was interested in the two characters Carol and Eddie and I wish they had a script with a little more sharper vision to it. There is one scene that shows two girls fighting and it was in slow motion. Why is that one and only scene in slow motion? No reason for it. It looked very badly staged. English viewers will recognize a lot of the actress's in the film while Americans will probably only recognize Robbie Coltrane in an early effort. Film just didn't have an original angle in the way it was presented. To bad, some really talented people were involved in this production.