Big Doll House
by Jack Hill
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Actor: Brooke Mills, Judith Brown, Judith M. Brown, Pam Grier, Roberta CollinsDirector: Jack Hill
Cinematographer: Fred Conde
Producer: Cirio H. Santiago
Producer: Eddie Romero
Producer: Jane Schaffer
Producer: John Ashley
Producer: Roger Corman
Writer: Don Spencer
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-12-26
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Buena Vista Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Big Doll House
DVD Review: "Search them...inside and out!"
Summary: 4 Stars
In the late 1960s actor/producer John Ashley, initially famous for appearing in a number of JD flicks, hooked up with writer/director/producer Eddie Romero in the Philippines to crank out a handful of inexpensive (i.e.cheapo), somewhat successful horror features. Always an eye towards the frugal, producer/director/writer Roger Corman jumped on the bandwagon in the early 1970s, teaming up with the pair to release his second feature under his newly formed `New World' (later to be known as Concorde) film group, a chicks in chains flick titled The Big Doll House (1971). Directed by Jack Hill (Spider Baby, The Big Bird Cage, Switchblade Sisters), the film features Judith M. Brown (Willie Dynamite), Roberta Collins (Women in Cages, Caged Heat), Brooke Mills (The Student Teachers), Pat Woodell (The Twilight People), and Pam Grier (Coffy, Foxy Brown), in her first major role. Also appearing is Christiane Schmidtmer (The Giant Spider Invasion), Kathryn Loder (Foxy Brown), Jerry Frank (Voodoo Island), and Sid `tall, bald and bearded' Haig (Spider Baby, Diamonds Are Forever).
The film starts out with the arrival of three new inmates at some podunk, backwater, women's prison located in the Philippines, I'm guessing, given the large number of Philippino extras running around. As the women are processed (full body cavity searches for everyone!) we meet Collier (Brown), one of the three prisoners, along with a butcher than butch head guard named Lucian (Loder). After this we get to meet Collier's new cellmates, and they're quite the assortment...there's Grear (Grier), who got tossed in the pokey for hustling and has a real hate/hate complex towards men, Bodine (Woodell), a political prisoner whose boyfriend is a rebel insurgent leader hiding out in the hills, Harrad (Mills), a weird junkie type with pyromaniac tendencies, incarcerated for killing her baby (that's lovely), a blondie named Alcott (Collins), and so on...life is difficult in the prison, as the days are filled with tedium labor either toiling in excessively muddy fields or weaving baskets, while the nights involve entertaining oneself with cockroach races, shankings, snitching on your cellmates, or spending time in Lucian's private chamber of sadomasochistic delights. As the film progresses we witness scenes of torture, a gratuitous and pointless shower sequence, more torture, talk of escape, a food fight, a mysterious figure in a hood overseeing the torture, a catfight that devolves into a fine display of mud wrestling, time outs in the hot box, electroshock therapy, snakes, and fun and games with Harry (Haig) and his new partner Fred (Frank), a pair of entrepreneurs who sell food, smokes, and what not to the prisoners (don't worry if you don't have the cash, as Harry will let you slide for a good groping), fantasizing about all the man hungry flesh locked behind the bars. Tired of being used and abused, a core group of girls plan an elaborate escape attempt, one that involves kidnapping the head mistress named Miss Dietrich (Schmidtmer).
What The Big Doll House lacks in aspects like cohesive story, good acting, and solid characters it more than makes up for in unmitigated sleazy fun. One thing that did surprise me a little was the fact there wasn't as much nekkidness in this movie as I would have expected. Oh, there was a decent amount, most all topless shots, a lot limited to flashes of flesh soon to be obscured by an arm, or someone turning their back towards the camera. This didn't bother me because what there was, was pretty nice (hello Ms. Grier...nice to see you and the twins). What was most notable was the complete absence of any Sapphic action. It was often alluded to in the story, but the film never delivered the goods (I wasn't looking for any hardcore dueling batwing action, but a little face suckage and copious fondling would have been nice). The plot is of the loosey goosey variety, meaning this is more or less an assemblage of sleaze soaked sequences eventually leading up to the big escape attempt. This was pretty much what I was expecting, as director Hill obviously knew enough to avoid attempting the premise of serious, social commentary in an effort to cover up the exploitive nature of the material, as was done in Corman's earlier film The Student Nurses (1970), which tried to conceal its lurid and skeezy nature by touching awkwardly upon a slew of feminine issues. While the characters themselves were of the garden-variety stock one would normally expect in a feature like this, some of the performances did stand out. Pam Grier makes one helluva butch prisoner, and I thought Haig's character just a whole lot of fun. Loder's character of Lucian, the sadistic, snake loving head guard was decent, but I only wish she would have turned it up a notch or two, as there was certainly room to do so...and check out the various native to the region extras in the prison...looks like they were recruited off the streets, having little idea what was actually going on...the last half of this film could have been titled `The Misadventures of Harry and Fred', as the pair play a more prominent role in the story, becoming entangled in the escape attempt as the women use the lure of hot prison lovin' to get the pair of knuckleheads to unwittingly help them in their plans, culminating in a sequence where the two end up in their underwear, forced at gunpoint to engage some naughty fun in the back of their truck in a twisted effort by the escapees to return some of the humiliation and degradation heaped upon them by their once captors. To say anymore would spoil things, so I'll leave it at that...overall, The Big Doll House was generally what I expected, an entertaining film packed with good, wholesome, scuzzy fun. This film was followed up a year later by one titled The Big Bird Cage (1972), which also featured Grier, and was written and directed by Jack Hill.
The fullscreen (1.33:1) picture quality on this DVD release is decent, and the Dolby Digital audio comes through well. As far as special features, there's cast and crew biographies, an original theatrical trailer, and a five minute interview piece between Leonard Maltin and Roger Corman where the two talk about this film like it was some form of high art. Corman also claims he decided to make this film in the Philippines because he thought he could get more for his money, but I think it was really just an effort to keep more dough in his pocket rather than spend what he saved on better production values. Also included are previews for the films Death Race 2000 (1975), Grand Theft Auto (1977), Eat My Dust (1976), Big Bad Mama (1974), and Humanoids from the Deep (1980), all recently re-issued onto DVD by Walt Disney Video, which, within the past year, acquired the release rights to Corman's extensive Concorde-New Horizons catalog of films.
Cookieman108
If I learned anything from this film, it's that if you ever find yourself in prison, avoid, if at all possible, sharing a cell with a junkie.
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Description of Big Doll House
Director Jack Hill, a protégé of the original schlockmeister, Roger Corman, knew his way around a low budget and a shocking subject. Women-in-prison films were nothing new in 1971, but The Big Doll House had it all--sex, violence, nudity, a sadistic guard, and a sexually frustrated warden--and served it up with an abundance of cheapjack energy and tongue-in-cheek humor. The beauty of Hill's movies lay in the way they could appeal not only to the hordes who would go see them at drive-ins but also to the true trash-cinema fans who could appreciate his offbeat sensibilities. The plot is rather hoary, with a new inmate discovering the corruption of the prison setup, complete with a drugged-out psycho, a cellmate informer, and a guard who delights in torturing the women with poisonous snakes. The girls put their heads together and begin to devise a way out of their tropical hellhole, but not before disrobing several times and having a knock-down, drag-out fight in the muddy rice paddy where they're forced to toil all day. The Big Doll House, like some of Hill's other movies, was shot in the Philippines, with the cast and crew making up plot elements and dialogue in near-guerrilla filmmaking. Though the islands were a cheap place to produce movies in the '70s, the working conditions were boot camp-like. Where The Big Doll House really succeeds is in its mix of titillation and action, a fast-paced combination that makes it one heck of a fun exploitation movie to watch. It's also worth noting that this movie gave the great Pam Grier her first real starring role; she would become a Jack Hill regular before moving on to more substantial roles. --Jerry RenshawBestsellers in DVD
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