My review was written in June 1984 after a Times Square screening.
"Escape from Womens Prison" is an obnoxious Italian exploitation film, lensed in 1978 under the more grammatically acceptable title "Breakout from a Women's Prison". Despite these come-on titles, film is not a prison picture, as it opens with the women already escaped.
Poorly developed story is sort of a femme variation on "The Desperate Hours": four women bust out of an Italian prison and take hostage a bus filled with a women's tennis team, hiding out in the mansion of a local judge, who is also taken prisoner. The women subject their prisoners to forced lesbian sex sets and even ludicrously force a captured man to have sex with one of them, until the police lay siege to the house, in-fightiing occurs among the foursome and handy nihilistic ending is delivered.
Ludicrous film is laughable in spots, especially when the role reversals are carried to extremes. Filmmakers include timeouts for dialectical politics in the form of harangues, but crude dubbing renders such diversions meaningless. Nadir of the film is probably when the judge beats jup and rapes the leader of the escaped foursome, in a turnabout cynically inserted to make the viewer side with the underdogs against the symbols of order: she is a political terrorist while the other thre women are hardened criminals.
Two prominent cast members are wasted: Lilli Carati, a beautiful and popular starlet cast as the tough terrorist, and Ines Pellegrini, an Ethiopian actress featured by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his "The Arabian Nights" and "Salo", here marking time as a wide-eyed victim.
Tech credits are poor, especially the brackish color and generally underlit visuals.
"Escape from Womens Prison" is an obnoxious Italian exploitation film, lensed in 1978 under the more grammatically acceptable title "Breakout from a Women's Prison". Despite these come-on titles, film is not a prison picture, as it opens with the women already escaped.
Poorly developed story is sort of a femme variation on "The Desperate Hours": four women bust out of an Italian prison and take hostage a bus filled with a women's tennis team, hiding out in the mansion of a local judge, who is also taken prisoner. The women subject their prisoners to forced lesbian sex sets and even ludicrously force a captured man to have sex with one of them, until the police lay siege to the house, in-fightiing occurs among the foursome and handy nihilistic ending is delivered.
Ludicrous film is laughable in spots, especially when the role reversals are carried to extremes. Filmmakers include timeouts for dialectical politics in the form of harangues, but crude dubbing renders such diversions meaningless. Nadir of the film is probably when the judge beats jup and rapes the leader of the escaped foursome, in a turnabout cynically inserted to make the viewer side with the underdogs against the symbols of order: she is a political terrorist while the other thre women are hardened criminals.
Two prominent cast members are wasted: Lilli Carati, a beautiful and popular starlet cast as the tough terrorist, and Ines Pellegrini, an Ethiopian actress featured by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his "The Arabian Nights" and "Salo", here marking time as a wide-eyed victim.
Tech credits are poor, especially the brackish color and generally underlit visuals.