Experiências Humanas

I like hardcore horror, but this banned film (sometimes marketed as a women in prison movie) is not very interesting and may be Scientologist propaganda.

Shocker scenes include the discovery of a massacred family and the full frontal nude spraying of inmates. Otherwise I found little of interest other than a scene involving the bloody and semi-topless lead covered in real live bugs, many of which were huge and bizarre.

Is the main character being psychologically tormented by an evil doctor or is she seeing things that are not there? I didn't really care, but it's all resolved at the end. Quite a far fetched and annoying end at that.

A women's prison doctor with a thing for creepy crawlies torments an innocent inmate. The main actors here all had careers beyond grindhouse, so the acting is better than most. I found the script unclear at points, and pointlessly interrupted three times by musical numbers, twice to showcase the leading lady's vocal skills--not bad, but out of place here--and somebody must have owed something to the band that plays a gratuitous concert for the ladies, apropos of nothing.. For a women's prison movie they certainly didn't take much advantage of the obvious opportunities for sexploitation. Prisoners are stripped, of course, but they all abide by the prohibition of physical interaction as barked to them by the matron over the loudspeaker. And it's even coitus interruptus alone as, just as our gal's about to stick her hand in her panties, it's lights on for a surprise rollcall. Talk about torture by deprivation! Add up the plus and minuses and you come up with something middling.

Rachel Foster is wrongly imprisoned for the murder of an entire family, once in prison however she is subjected to mind altering experiments at the hands of the prison psychiatrist with results.

A good women in prison movie with some strong points. The story is nothing special but is handled well, and has enough movement within the story to hold interest. Performances are all pretty good, Linda Haynes in the lead as Rachel gives a very strong portrayal of the innocent prisoner, Aldo Ray & Geoffrey Lewis are also strong in their roles. There are also some very good sequences within the film including, the scene where Rachel is losing her mind and a hoard of insects are coming in to her cell and she then crawls her way through the ducting it's a strong and commanding scene. The main problem with the film though is it's pace, although the story is OK the pace of the film is sometimes so slow it feels it's taking a age to develop and the audience may start to drift off.

This is not a violent or gruesome film, there is a scene at the beginning where you see a family who have been shot and later in the film you see a woman hanging, these are the two most violent things in the film and are both aftermath shots, so how this relatively mild W.I.P. movie ever got caught up the Video Nasty scare here in the UK really is shocking and it is something it most certainly didn't deserve. If you can see this pretty rare film give it a watch it isn't bad.

Country singer Rachel Foster (Linda Haynes) is undoubtedly the unluckiest person alive as she stumbles upon a young kid who has just slaughtered his family. She shoots the kid (he goes into a coma), resulting in a life sentence after the crooked Sheriff pins all the murders on her. But this is no ordinary prison as the Warden (Mercedes Shirley) and Dr. Kline (Geoffrey Lewis) are conducting bizarre behavioral experiments on their charges. My Aldo Ray mini-marathon continues with this sleazy exploitation flick. Ray pops up in the first 15 minutes as a lecherous bar owner who tries to get it on with our lead. There are some memorable bits in this and, on a whole, it is a pretty solid WIP entry with a few nice twists. Lewis does a great job as the creepy doctor and their is a nice supporting role from Ellen Travolta. Haynes is an attractive lead and isn't afraid to deliver the genre required nudity. The only odd thing is the filmmakers having her sing to terrible vocals supplied by someone else. The film's oddity highlight though is the Warden booking the band Satan & The Lucifers to perform for her inmates. Director Gregory Goodell excels in the film's last third where Foster's nightmares come to life to haunt her. Sadly, he went on to Lifetime movies exclusively after this.

This movie is most famous for having been banned in Britain during the "video nasty" scare of the early 80's. I can only suppose the idiots mistook it for a Nazi death camp exploitation flick, like the similarly titled "S.S. Experiment Camp", because it's really not all that shocking or offensive. 70's actress Linda Haynes plays a country singer. Haynes was very cute and sexy, but she was a TERRIBLE singer, which might explain why her character only gets booked by horny hicks at honky-tonk bars out in the middle of nowhere. While driving back from one of these gigs, her car breaks down. She goes to a farmhouse to use the phone, only to discover that a pre-teen boy living there has slaughtered his entire family with a shotgun. She shoots the homicidal tyke in self-defense and ends up being blamed for all the murders.

The movie for awhile turns into a rural WIP movie like "Jackson County Jail"--there is a "de-lousing" and shower scene, some aborted lesbianism, and a brief cat fight--but not as much as usual in a WIP film (gratefully, perhaps since all the other prisoners are generally unattractive). But this particular prison also has a bent psychiatric doctor played by Geoffrey Lewis (side-kick to Clint Eastwood and the father of Juliette Lewis). He has some crackpot therapy where he breaks the worst offenders down to the level of infants, where they're clutching teddy bears and sucking their thumbs, and then he tries to "rebuild" them as respectable citizens. So far, however, all his "experiments" have gone horribly awry.

The scenes of the prison authorities breaking the Hayne's characters will are pretty effective--the crackpot shrink is also a frustrated entomologist, so at one point they pour disgusting insects all over her, and they do other stuff like stage mock executions and try to convince her she's going insane. None of this rises much above the level of a TV movie though, and it hardly justifies this movie's "nasty" status. The image of grown women reduced to infantilism is kind of disturbing, but if this were a Jess Franco or European WIP film, they probably would have tried to make this sexy somehow, which would have been far more disturbing.

The ending is REALLY stupid, but I didn't find this movie boring generally speaking. And it certainly didn't deserve the "nasty" treatment it got from the British censors.