In the 1970’s a new era of exploitation genre emerged a chain of successful franchises, the Women In Prison movies that started in the drive-in circuts has become a winning formula worldwide. The Big Doll House which was released in America in 1971 tells the story of a group of women surviving the harsh treatments in an all female prison.
The film starts off with Collier ( Judith M. Brown) being sent to an all female prison in the Phillipines for murdering her husband, upon her arrival she is introduced to her new cellmates who take an instant disliking to her, this resulting in tiffs and tants eventually displeasing the head wardress ( Kathryn Loder) to torturing the women while a unknown cloaked person watches on. These events lead two of the inmates Alcott and Bodine ( Roberta Collins and Pat Woodell) to devise a plan to escape with the help of the other women. Breaking out of the prison they decide to take the supervisor (Christiane Schmidtmer) who they discover was the mysterious cloaked person hostage with the help of two men, with guns ablazing enter the jungle, take refuge and fight back.
Roger Corman who produced the women in prison series made the films effective by having shapely women in tight prison uniforms working in the fields, taking showers together and frequently being tortured before fighting back with guns. With this kind of movie you know where the film’s going with the predictable storylines, but in the 1970’s this formula for movies was successful enough to spawn sequels and make the exploitation genre popular.
What also made this film convincing was when the women had a food fight which resulted in a cafeteria hosedown and when two of the prisoners took a fight to the canefields that ended up them having a mud-wrestling catfight was great fun and the location for this film made it look gritty which went well with the tortue scenes.
Overall this film is stylish enough with good characters and unexpectedly filmed well for it’s time, the acting was done above average especially with Pam Grier and the ending action scenes were excellent givin this is an exploitatation film you can’t expect it to be a hollywood movie, I would give this film 3/5 there’s nothing like a movie were women have guns and fight that’s more appealing to me.