Violence In A Women's Prison
(1982) He gave us the greatest post-apocalyptic-giant-ratmen-battles-biker movie ever
made (Rats: Night Of Terror), the epic crossdresser-battles-zombie movie (Hell Of The Living Dead) and now Bruno Mattei would like to sentence us to one of the all-time
scuzziest women-in-prison movies ever! Well, the women-in-prison movie he made right after this one with the same cast, crew, and most of the same story (Women's Prison Massacre) is also one of the all-time scuzziest, but I'll leave the debate as to which is actually the scuzziest to the historians.
Say what you want about Violence In A Women's Prison, but you can't fault it for not being scuzzy enough for you. Chalk full of
lesbianism, brutality, and a men's prison right across the street, Bruno makes
sure that he gets every cent worth of filth out the $67,000 budget. And no,
I'm not making a moral judgment when I refer to the filth in this movie. I'm
just talking about the pail of feces that star Laura Gemser empties all over
one of the women prison guards. A cursory glance at the DVD insert shows us what sort of time we're in for,
what with chapter titles such as "Parcel Check/Brawl," "Contagious Sex," "Death
Slide," and my personal favorite, "Poop Party/Rats." Yes, that particular
chapter details Ms. Gemser's close encounter with said pail as well as her time
in solitary confinement (apparently hurling dung all over the prison guards is
a big no-no in these strict women's prisons run by sadistic wardens). Never
one to leave his cronies unemployed, Bruno uses a bunch of rats that he would
later shoot to super stardom in his previously mentioned rat opus, to take
bites out of Gemser's stocking-clad legs while she's in solitary. That brings up a few questions I had about this women's prison. Now I've done
my fair share of time in women's prisons and one of the things I found a bit
odd about this particular women's prison was the wardrobe. First of all, the
inmates are all wearing these pigeon-poop grey dresses that look like big flour
sacks. That part I could understand. With the prisoners probably running the
laundry, they're aren't going to worry about mixing colors and white and the
government isn't going to want to spring for something along the lines of Cheer
with Colorguard.  The part of their wardrobe that left me puzzled was the fact that underneath
these sacks, they all wore thigh high hose! That seemed like a silly clothing
choice from an economic standpoint. When you've got gals getting their hose
torn in poop fights, rat attacks, and when getting thrown down mountains of
sand at the local quarry where they're all breaking rocks, you're going to be
going through an awful lot of hose. At the very least, I would strongly
suggest that the government look in to getting some of these gals some bras in
lieu of hose. That at least might cut down on a lot of the impromptu flashing
of the male inmates inexplicably housed across the courtyard. Either that or
let the gals wear high heels. Those prison issue flats just don't give you
that sophisticated "I'm a convicted hooker who's going to be raped by a prison
guard tonight" look that I think they were trying for.
Now that we've dissected the fallacies with the wardrobe in this one (Thigh
highs? Really, some of these gals could have used control top easy!), it might
be best to move on to the story behind all this violence in that women's
prison. Those of you who've seen the Jean Claude Van Damme prison polemic, Death Warrant (you know the one - he gets hit in the head with a really big wrench) will no
doubt find the story of this movie comfortingly familiar. Laura Gemser plays a reporter named Emanuelle who goes undercover to uncover
the shocking truth about a women's prison run by a bunch of really mean broads.
And though I'm a bit rusty on this whole Emanuelle business, my tastes running
toward more wholesome fair like Italian movies where fashion models get sliced
instead of perverted French and/or Italian trash where fashion models get laid,
my understanding is that this is some sort of entry in the whole Black Emanuelle offshoot of the Emanuelle series (a bit like a Mothra movie instead of a
Godzilla movie). Manny is freelancing for Amnesty International which I think justifies all the
dirty stuff that Bruno chooses to dramatize, since it's all in the name of
exposing abysmal prison conditions in the hopes of effecting some positive
change. Really, it's no different than when the nightly news forces us to
watch pictures of starving kids with bloated bellies while we're trying to
horse down that third hamburger and not trying to spit up our fourth beer in
disgust. It's just that in this case, you've got ugly Eurobroads getting
fondled by prison guards instead of kids with flies camping on their faces.  So, after initially being a bit ashamed at having purchased this DVD, I was
uplifted to know that I was watching a powerful political statement about how
the way we treat those who deserve to be treated the worst (hookers, drug
addicts, old lady pickpockets) actually is a reflection of our own humanity or
lack thereof. I was expecting the movie to end with an 800 number that I could
call to get more information on women's prison reform instead of the syrupy
ballad that sounded as if the Bee Gees had fallen on hard times and called in
some favors with Italian film score legend Goblin to get them a gig in Italian
movies.
Manny arrives at the prison and immediately becomes part of the story she was
trying to uncover when she is handed the by now infamous pail of pooh-pooh and
ordered to empty it. Now, I won't sit here and tell you that I wasn't rooting
for her to empty it all over these nasty skanks giving the orders, but once she
did it, I began to wonder if this was really the smartest thing to do. I don't
think that her job was to go into the prisons and provoke abuse. But once the
crap went flying the prison guards played right into her hands and embarked on
a full-fledged dump-splattered cat fight! Okay, we've established that the evil prison guards don't like having poop
flung on them. It's time to really get things going and introduce a couple of
characters that we immediately know will be helping out our heroine once she
gets out of solitary confinement with all those hungry rats. Her cell mate is
an old hag who's been there forever and she can show a new prisoner the ropes
as well as the pet cockroach she keeps in a little wooden cage. And yes, that
poor little devil gets stomped by one of the bad guys, thus bringing this
women's prison into PETA's gun sights as well as Amnesty International's.  Her other pal is a kindly doctor in the men's prison doing time for euthanizing
his terminally ill wife. He helps her escape and they decide to take a breather
from escaping by engaging in some good old fashioned "escaped prisoner sex" (is
there anything better?) Of course they get caught (taking the morning off for
humping instead of humping it to a country without an extradition treaty has a
way of doing that), but the doctor mailed a letter to the government about the
prison conditions, so there still might be hope for our horny heroes.
Definitely sleazy in every way you can imagine, from the used-looking actors
and actresses to the two-toned painted walls (pink and white) of the women's
prison itself. The movie seemed to delight in being as classless as possible
and though it played out exactly as you assumed it would (old hag with
cockroach gets killed, the prison snitch gets killed, the head guard we all
hated ends up stabbed in the back with a spoon), really, if you're the kind of
person that bought a movie called Violence In A Women's Prison, would you have it any other way? A thoroughly tasteless, oversexed,
understoried, violent effort done in the lowest budget of ways from Bruno
Mattei. For anyone else, a dismal failure, but for Bruno, another triumph of
exploitation filmmaking, showing that he may not be the master of many (or any)
genres, but isn't shy about tackling and applying his own unique cinematic
spackle to any of them.
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