Review of Violence in a Women's Prison

Ugh...this is only my second Black Emanuelle experience (after the even more infamous "Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals") and I'm already bored senseless with the character. "Violence in a Women's Prison" is a textbook example of the temporarily popular Euro-exploitation culture. These WIP-movies are notorious for their many vicious-sounding alternate titles and their supposedly controversial substance but, if you actually take the effort of seeing one, you'll agree that they're in fact very dull and far too inept to be taken serious. The ambitious reporter Emanuelle sets up a fake criminal record and goes undercover in a feared women's prison with the purpose of exposing the inhuman barbarities that take place inside the penitentiary's walls. She soon finds out that it was a lousy career move as she ends up in hell itself! All the inevitable sleaze-tricks to stuff up a typical exploitation flick with are exaggeratedly present: sadistic lesbian guards, humiliation, girl-on-girl action, rapes & beatings and a seemly endless amount of cat-fights. Everything the avid cult-fanatics adore, in other words, but I suppose that even they can't get passed the awful dialogues or the completely irrational plot-twists. The film isn't gory or shocking at all (apart from that one sequence in which our heroine is almost entirely devoured by red-eyed rats) and the uninspired overload of nudity becomes boring pretty quick. Slightly positive aspects are the neat musical score and the surprisingly well-handled directing by Bruno Mattei (or Vincent Dawn, as he likes to call himself here). The success of "Violence in a Women's Prison" – as well as of the entire Black Emanuelle series – entirely depends on the gorgeous Laura Gemser. She sure is one of the most beautiful women who ever lived...but she hasn't got the slightest bit of acting skills. If you browse around IMDb regularly, you'll notice that there are many WIP-movies on the market. Jess Franco made a lot of them, of course, like "99 Women" and "Barbed Wire Dolls", but even the more respected filmmakers like Jack Hill (Big Dolls House) and even Jonathan Demme (Caged Heat) have them on their repertoires. You can either do like everybody else and avoid them because they are "naughty" or watch one and see for yourself that's it's a whole lot of fuss about nothing.