As you undoubtedly know (otherwise you wouldn't be reading the review for a movie such as this one
), the seventies were a glorious decade for sleazy and exploitative cinematic smut! Quite early in the decade already, Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left" launched the popular hype of so-called 'rape & revenge' thrillers. These are thriller/horror movies in which a poor and defenseless girl, or a whole bunch of poor and defenseless girls, is viciously raped by a gang of ruthless thugs, but then in the final act she – or her family – cruelly gets even. This fairly simplistic idea quickly got imitated numerous times in the next couple of years, notably in Italy, and the premise also got stretched quite a bit. Pretty soon, there were more movies where the rape and sex sequences became over- dominant while the revenge part was just a minor footnote at the end of the film. There also came films, like "Convicts Women" a.k.a. "Bust Out", where the rape & revenge plot only formed a weak excuse to depict non-stop gratuitous soft-core pornography! Here we have the "story" of two escaped convicts, supposedly chased by the police even though there isn't a single copper in the entire film, that interrupt their rush to Mexico in order to interfere with a Sunday school picnic, play volleyball and have an orgy with the not-so catholic under-aged girls. These girls aren't as cherubic and innocent as their Sunday school counselors assume, though. One of them abandons the group no less than three times to go and have wild sex with her boyfriend who patiently waits for her a bit further away in the woods. Two of the other girls jump and narrowly rape the escaped convicts rather than vice versa. The final girl is still strongly religious and very much against premarital sex at first, but turns into a bona fide nymphomaniac once she gets "raped". Oh yes, this is another one of those flicks supporting the infamous and dreadful "rape fantasy"; meaning the victims weakly attempt to push off their assailant and say no, but at the same time they are putting their hands around his body and mean yes! When it eventually becomes clear that these men are fugitive criminals, they take the group hostage and lock themselves in a barn. There they "rape" the counselor's wife and "force" the four girls to have sex with the male counselor. It's quite hilarious to see that the supposedly prudish and devoted Christian wife has giant fake breasts, and how the husband's protest rapidly fades away when the four girls are undressing him. There isn't anything else to write about "Convicts Women", in fact. There isn't any suspense, atmosphere or character development. There's just sex. Naturally I don't have anything against sex in 70s exploitation movies, but I did expect at least some sort of additional storyline from the director of "Grave of the Vampire" and "Garden of the Dead".
PS: the guy – I don't even know what his name is – playing the boyfriend of girl #1 does have the most fantastic job in cinema history! He just lays on the grass, has passionate sex three times with the sexiest girl of the group and then at the end of the movie he still becomes the hero who saves the day! He's a role model to us all...
