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Erwin Dietrich's VIP The Official
Jess Franco Collection continues along in fine fashion with another
superior DVD presentation. ILSA: THE WICKED WARDEN may be
the ne plus ultra of Euro-Women in Prison films. It certainly manages to
outdo even BARBED WIRE
DOLLS in terms of brutality and perversity.
1975-Las Palomas Clinic: Somewhere in South America a corrupt
dictatorship utilizes the talents of one Greta Del Pino (Dyanne Thorne)
to manage a clinic dedicated to the treatment of women with sexual
disorders. Well, that's the official line. The Las Palomas Clinic is
actually a government sponsored prison where common criminals and
political detainees are humiliated, interrogated, sexually abused,
tortured with electricity, and sometimes lobotomized. Dr. Greta oversees
it all with a perverse zest while her assistant secretly films the
brutality to sell to an international snuff film operation. Into this
hellhole comes Aby Phillips (Tania Busselier) working undercover with
opposition leader Dr Arcos (Jess Franco himself) on a mission to find
her sister and expose the real purpose of Las Palomas.
Franco obviously had a slightly higher budget this time out and the
glossy cinematography of Rudolf Kuttel gives the film a slick sheen that
differentiates it stylistically from the down and dirty look of
BARBED WIRE DOLLS.
The perversions and brutality on display here, though, are even more
extreme with Franco constantly ratcheting up the levels of sleaze. No
human atrocity will go undepicted. Our heroine is groped, given vaginal
injections of acid, subjected to electro-shock until she foams at the
mouth, hung from chains... but the worst is yet to come! It's all played
out to the ironically pleasant guitar and flute score of Walter
Baumgartner. IRONY is the key word here. Franco seems to be doing some
political winking at the audience here as if to justify the onscreen
mayhem. Casting himself as the liberal Dr Arcos makes the in-joke even
more explicit. But there's also a serious edge here. The ending combines
elements of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST with
CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE
as Greta, the sadistic lesbian with big hair and even bigger boobs is
eaten alive by the vengeance crazed inmates. This is all duly recorded
by her smiling Sergeant who will make a big profit upon delivering the
film to his contact, who has requested an erotic murder,
something "primeval." The cycle of sexploitation will continue.
An excellent cast makes this all highly believable and compelling within
its own heightened reality. In fact, producer Dietrich even speculates
in the accompanying documentary that such a scenario may have happened
somewhere at sometime. He may have a point. Dyanne Thorne, dubbed Ilsa
here to cash in on her fame with that series of sado-erotic titles, is
the perfect and only choice for the ferocious Greta Del Pino. Abandon
all hope, you who enter here, she tells the inmates and proves herself
correct and lives out a hubristic scenario in which she will be the
ultimate victim. Equally effective is Lina Romay as the morose Juana,
Greta's "bitch" who acts as a human pin cushion at one point to satisfy
her own masochism as well as Greta's sadism. She can quickly turn into
the aggressor, though, as is exemplified by a particularly stomach
churning episode where she forces the heroine to become her human toilet
paper. I'll leave the rest to your imagination... but director Franco
will NOT. Franco and Ms Busselier also acquit themselves well as the
doomed representatives of "good." Of course, this being a Jess Franco
film there can be no "happy" ending, so he decides to anticipate his
later cannibal epics (THE DEVIL HUNTER, WHITE
CANNIBAL QUEEN, TENDER FLESH) by intercutting a
tigress tearing apart prey in the wild as the inmates decide to have
Greta a la carte. Disgustingly bloody close-ups of teeth pulling flesh
off the bone, while crimson splatters on the faces of one of Greta's
dolls. Franco's comment on the various genres he was sampling at the
time; sexploitation, WIP, cannibal? Maybe. But it's exploitation with a
conscience and forces the viewer to examine his or her own motives and
attractions to such genres. |
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