Les gardiennes du pénitencier

Jailhouse Wardress (1979)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

A real mess of a WIP picture from Eurocine actually has about 2% new footage and the rest is taken from other movies including HITLER'S LAST TRAIN, ELSA FRAULEIN SS and Jess Franco's BARBED WIRE DOLLS. The new "plot" has a SS officer and his girlfriend traveling to South America after the end of WW2. A special agents goes after them. That "new" plot only lasts for a couple minutes so that pretty much tells you all you need to know. I'm going to guess that this new footage was meant to be an entire film but the studio ran out of money, shut down the production and then just edited it in with other footage to create this mess. Fans of naziploitation really don't have too many reasons to check this out as the three other movies are all available uncut so you might as well watch all of them instead of this edited down mess. Fans of Jess Franco are the main ones who will want to check this out for a couple reasons. The biggest is that the majority of the film is footage from BARBED WIRE DOLLS, the ultimate WIP film, and the dubbing here is of course different and this is why you will want to check it out. If you're familiar with the original film then it's rather funny seeing how they've changed the dialogue and in some cases made it even funnier. Remember the scene in BARBED WIRE DOLLS where Lina Romay kills her father (played by Franco) after he comes onto her sexually? Well, that scene is here with the alternate dialogue and it will having laughing out loud. Outside of that entertainment, this film is a pretty big zero as it doesn't make a bit of sense and the only real reason to watch is trying to figure out which scenes belong to which movie.

The title tempted me to give this a whirl, but the date should have warned me. In common with most exploitation films this sounds fun but is just dull. Very very dull.

Supposedly set just after the fall of the Third Reich but obviously made much later and full of ugly seventies clothes and hairstyles, the title wardress carries a riding crop and wears a monocle but appears to forgotten to have put on her trousers when she got dressed that morning. The constant zooms and pans suggest that the camera operator was either drunk or stoned, and it has that other sine qua non of all lousy movies: a Hammond organ score.

Avoid.

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.

"What do we do now?" "Let's get undressed" Jailhouse Wardress is a bit of a mess in terms of story, at the end of World War 2 a high ranking Nazi SS officer flees to South Africa and becomes the cruel governor of a bizarre women's jail, an assassination plot is made to kill him. The bulk of the film looks 1970's/early 80's but our villain hasn't aged a day since 1945, either he has some miracle anti-ageing potion or the makers didn't give a hoot about making the time setting look convincing. There are two directors credited, Alain Deruelle, who specialised in pornography, and Spanish legend Jess Franco, known for his many horror films though he too dabbled in adult movies. I am a fan of Jess, even his bad movies and this falls into that category. He gives his usual cameo appearance , his real life lover Lina Romay is one of the stars in this flick. The prison is an old coastal castle, the location is quite nice but there are only a handful of inmates and the governor's office looks like it was filmed in somebody's lounge! The editing is bad, the dubbing is terrible and it is obvious that the film was put together using footage from other movies, the picture quality varying quite a lot. Yes, it is very flawed but let's be honest there is only one reason to watch this women in prison/Nazisploitation thriller and that is for the sex and nudity, of which there is a great deal. Full frontal female nudity throughout, some of the men get in on the action too but as was so typical back then - with one exception - the guys get to keep their clothes on! Also back then the "natural look" was in which makes the nudity look dated. The Euro musical score is easy on the ears and I did like seeing the exotic plants outside of the prison but the sex novelty soon wore off and gave up with the "plot".

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.