99 Women - 1969

I have seen a Jess Franco movie here and there on this blog before.  There's a whole lot of movies of his I could delve into if I really wanted to, but truth is I don't really want to.  I'll indulge from time to time, and review it here.  And this is returning to the Women's Prison Massacre type of film that is sexploitation.

99 Women is about a women's prison where our main lady Marie gets sent.  Prisoners there include Rosalbi Neri from Lady Frankenstein and a host of other hot and barely dressed women.  I watched the "unrated" version which had nudity and sex aplenty, and it was even hardcore in nature.  This is a lot like the 70's movement that was going on at the time.  With recent changes in the censorship rules, a lot of movies were capitalizing and basically making pornos.  Deep Throat would come out soon after this movie, becoming perhaps the best known of these movies.

There is in this movie:  hardcore scenes of sex with penis in vagina shots.  Oral sex scenes with penis in mouth or tongue licking vagina.  Lesbian sex scenes with touching, licking, kissing etc.  One scene where you can see spread labia.  And most surprising to me, several scenes where you could see close ups of assholes, even if the asses themselves were not the focus cause we're supposedly watching the insertion right around it.

Moving on from all those gritty details, what do we have here...  Marie is sent to the prison, she doesn't know the ropes and gets punished by the cruel Madame Thelma Diaz.  Diaz and Governor Santos are in cahoots to punish and torture the prisoners more than allowed, Santos regularly having sex with them and punishing them in extreme ways.  Soon, Diaz is going to potentially get replaced by new warden Leonie Caroll.  Marie with two other prisoners decide this would be an ideal time to escape, and go about their plan.

If you cut out the nudity, this movie would be about an hour long.  It's 100 minutes as it stands, about a solid 40 minutes of that is probably the sex.  The sex comes often and is definitely a focal point.  We see a lot of nudity, exploitation, and we get off.  The film, in this way, does achieve it's goal.  But what's also surprising is that it's actually watchable beyond the sex.  The acting is quite good, the drama is there, and we actually care about Marie and warden Caroll.

The music was also pretty cool, and the pacing was decent.  All in all, I was surprised I liked this as much as I did!  I was pretty much expecting something that was plotless and dumb, with loads of nudity.  And sure, the nudity in this doesn't exactly "enhance the story", and sometimes it's very extraneous, but it'a actually really not that bad a film!  I liked it alright.  I give it 3 stars.