Kattiera Nana I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Diagonaldi Very well executed

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Borserie it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

Nigel P Here's something - a Jess Franco 'Women in prison' film (his first), with Harry Allan Towers and not Erwin C. Dietrich, who would be associated with future incarceration endeavours. It is interesting to note the differences - this is nearly a decade before the Dietrich projects and the usual lesbian and titillation hasn't reached graphic levels yet. Also Bruno Nicolai's soundtrack almost seems to have been loaned from a blockbuster movie, lending more doom-laden atmospherics to the terrifically austere surroundings than is sometimes strictly necessary.There's a good cast here. Herbert Lom is always very watchable: I'm surprised he did this - his perverse cold-hearted Governor Santos is someone Howard Vernon or Paul Muller (or Franco himself) might usually play. Having said that, his peccadillos are always off-screen. Marie Schell is hardened and glamorous as Leonie Caroll, brought in to observe the activities of current governor Thelma Diaz. Diaz is played by the magnificent Mercedes McCambridge, short on stature but a performance as arch and camp as can be imagined. McCambridge (whose main point of interest for horror fans might well be her voicing of the demon in 1973's 'The Exorcist') appears to relish each moment and steals every scene. Maria Rohm plays Maria who, blonde and pretty, is always in Diaz's sights. And it is always a pleasure to see Rosalba Neri, here as constantly smouldering Zoie: a former 'exotic dancer', I'm delighted to say.The Alicante location is delicious and the building used for the prison is suitably Spartan and yet crammed with interest. Flaking paint, featureless walls, paradise-like views always out-of-grasp. The whole production looks terrific and might well be Franco's most restrained, coherent and 'mainstream' WIP picture. It also might just be my favourite. Things move at a fair rate, the relentless austerity is broken up by the flashbacks that flesh out the back-stories for the main inmates. The violence and torture takes place for the most part, just off-camera, and is no less effective for that. And the story builds up a genuine sense of frightening momentum towards the end, which makes the very satisfying finale tragically inevitable. Thoroughly recommended to those familiar with Franco, and those who are not.The soundtrack is enlivened by the occasional insertion of variants of the theme song, 'The Day I Was Born' (sung by Barbara McNair, the wronged and wonderful Rita from Franco's 1968 'Venus in Furs'), which is guaranteed to bury itself into your brain for a long time after you first hear it.

ferbs54 Anyone at all familiar with the work of director Jess Franco knows that choosing a rental from his gigantic oeuvre of 190+ films (!) is a crapshoot at best. "99 Women," from 1969, is fairly typical Franco: cheaply made, often sleazy, and featuring an overdependence on the ol' zoom lens. This early WIP (women in prison) flick transpires at an unnamed island locale, although the press kit for the film states that it takes place off the coast of Panama. Here, the 99 female inmates of the title are sadistically looked after by a superintendent played by Mercedes McCambridge, in heavily accented monster mode; on the other side of the island, Herbert Lom (born Schluderpacheru...love that name!) wards over the 500 male prisoners, using Mercedes' girls as his own private brothel. The film boasts a very impressive cast, including Luciana Paluzzi, Rosalba Neri and Maria Rohm--three of the hottest Eurobabes of the time--as prisoners, and Maria Schell as a kindly prison investigator. Unfortunately, the great Paluzzi is shockingly underused in this film, her role limited to a mere seven words of dialogue and barely 10 minutes of screen time. Worse, a seemingly obligatory soft-core lesbian scene between Rosalba and Rohm is somehow made quite dull by Franco; don't know how he managed that with two such smoking beauties! On the plus side, "99 Women" features some fairly decent acting (especially by the old pros McCambridge and Lom), scenic outdoor locales (on one of this Blue Underground DVD's copious extras, Franco reveals that the film was largely shot at an ancient fortress in Alicante, Spain, on the Mediterranean coast), and a nicely downbeat ending. The movie, apparently, was quite a hit in its day, and with its many exploitative elements--nudity, lesbianism, prison escape, prison riot, whippings, drug and prostitution references--it is easy to see why. Today, the film strikes the viewer as entertaining shlock, but at least it IS entertaining, and certainly worth a slack-jawed look....

Coventry Does the world really need all these 'Women in Prison' flicks? The legendary director Jess Franco apparently seemed to think so, because almost half of the titles that fall under this category are his. There's also a lot of variation in this questionable sub genre of cult-cinema - largely determined by how old they are - as most of them are really nasty and exploitative whereas some (the pioneers mainly) are more sensual and emphasizing on the drama-elements. "99 Women", at least the original non-hardcore version, got released during the earliest stage of "W.I.P" madness and thus Franco was still clearly 'exploring' how far he could go with inserting lesbian sleaze and brutal whippings. The later ones are a non-stop series of tasteless sex and raw violence, but this film actually has a remotely decent script and an above-average amount of stylish elements. A small island in the Pacific Ocean serves as a gigantic prison, with a fort for women in one corner and one for men in the other. Female prisoners n° 97, 98 and 99 arrive one morning by boat and they immediately meet the sadistic head warden Thelma and the sleazy Governor Santos. The girls are punished and put in isolation cells for no reason and lethal 'accidents' appear to be a regular routine. Just because so many prisoners die, the government sends a new female principal to the island. She makes efforts to befriend the prisoners, particularly the beautiful & innocent Marie, but the wicked old headmistress constantly boycotts her. "99 Women" isn't the most exciting movie ever, as many sequences are dreadfully slow and pointless, and there's a serious lack of continuity. The locations are very nice looking and the photography is occasionally even elegant, but sadly it's all just an empty package. If you don't purchase the X-rated version, you won't have much sleazy goodness to admire. "99 Women" is incredibly tame, with only a couple of scarcely dressed women cat-fighting and some lesbian experimenting. The cast is really good, though, with the ravishing regular Franco-nymphs Maria Rohm ("The Bloody Judge", "Eugenie") and Rosalba Neri ("Amuck!", "Lady Frankenstein") playing likable characters. Herbet Lom is awesome as the fiendish, nudity-obsessed (can you blame him?) governor. Mainly just recommended to Francophiles.

Aussie Stud "99 Women" starring Oscar-winner Mercedes McCambridge as a sadistic prison warden and Maria Schell as a super-intendant with lesbionic tendencies towards one of the female inmates, who'd have thought that you could have gone wrong with this one? Apparently not me as I was quite excited about my purchase of this movie. It was pretty horrible as expected, but not in a good way. I was hoping this was going to be one of those hilarious women-in-prison exploitation flicks that were high in camp value. Hell, Mercedes McCambridge is in it! First off, the movie started off positively. We have three broads arriving on a boat, still in the clothes they were apparently arrested in, tried in Court, and then literally, sent up the river in! We are introduced to the blonde starlet, Marie, the black-haired stripper, Helga, and some other brunette who dies from some sort of "accident" that required medical surgery.The camp factor needle hits "HIGH" as soon as we are introduced to Mercedes McCambridge appearing in a warden's uniform, barking orders in a faux-German accent (even though her name is Thelma Diaz) and giving Marie a backhand across the face for using her name instead of her number, "99".However it only gets worse from here. While there are certainly some entertaining cat-fight scenes (ie hair-pulling, clothes being ripped off, face slapping, etc), the rest of the film is incredibly boring. There is a sadistic male warden (Herbert Lom) who coerces one of the female prisoners into seducing Marie for his pleasure, and there is one un-named prison guard who has the most hilarious facial expressions when introducing guests to McCambridge, but the rest of the film falls flat.Maria Schell is not in the film nearly enough, and when she is, it's hard to determine what her true agenda is. It seems like she has a thing for Marie, but they never explore it.When the girls finally break out and trek through a "jungle", there are a few more camp moments, such as the scene with the harmless snake where upon spotting it and instead of running around it, the girls proceed to scream, grab it and cut it with a knife (LOL). The other semi-amusing moment was watching Marie and Helga make a dash for the fishing boats, hand-in-hand and wearing nothing short of see-through panties and torn jumpsuits.Mercedes McCambridge was the movie's only saving grace. Her accent border-lined German and Spanish, and she had some pretty hilarious one-liners such as, "She was put in the punishment cell... for repeated insolences!" At various moments, her voice deepened into that same voice she used as Pazuzu in "The Exorcist", I thought maybe she was going to morph into Satan at any moment.The most interesting thing that I heard about this movie was that there is an X-rated version out there. I watched the un-rated version which had no explicit sex scenes, only some gratuitous breast shots and a glimpse of bush. I shudder at the thought that Mercedes McCambridge might have filmed a scene not knowing that at some later point her body double would be enjoying an explicit lesbian sex scene with one of the female prisoners.I would not recommend this movie to any women-in-prison enthusiasts out there. In fact, I would only recommend this movie to Mercedes McCambridge fans as she is the sole reason I gave this movie "one star". Don't waste your time with this one folks.