Rats: Night of Terror (1984), by Bruno Mattei

Synthesizers and badly-dubbed dialogue are the waters which take us to the world of 225 AB; AB being "After the Bomb." This is a world of Bruno Mattei's making--it's remarkable what he and Claudio Fragasso thought the future would be like. A dark and shabby place, inhabited largely by danger and idiocy. It's no wonder that after-the-end movies were so big in the '80s, but Mattei's unique (or "unique") vision of what humanity and rat-anity would become stands out to me among a vast tan-gray sea of repetitive Mad Max cash-ins. Mark my words, I'm sure there are some "nods" to Mad Max in Rats: Night of Terror that I'm missing, but this is Mattei through-and-through, for better or worse.

Rats doesn't really follow a specific "plot," per se--we mostly just follow a group of dozen-odd "New Primitives" as they attempt to fit in with the surface world after mankind has spent two centuries living underground. (In a reference that doesn't bode well, Mattei mentions that the nuclear holocaust happens in 2015. I'm abstaining from any "two years overdue" jokes.) They all wear outfits that Doctor Who would wear if he regenerated twelve times in the '80s--hell, there's even a girl who dresses like a fucking vampire! They slowly uncover many gruesome secrets about their world, such as the fact that the previous settlers of the surface were all killed by the legions of rats that now rule the ruined former metropolises. And slowly, one by one, the same fate befalls them. Either they damn themselves with their own idiocy by mocking the rats or the rats do weirdly intelligent things like eat through their motorcycle tires. In the end, only a small group of survivors makes it out to witness the ending, which...oh, I'll talk about that.

But to start with, let's just dig into something that nagged at my mind upon rewatching this: what genre is this? I've deliberately tried to avoid horror films in these last few weeks leading up to Spookyween, but it seems I've written myself into a bit of a pickle, as Rats: Night of Terror definitely looks to be a horror film. Post-apocalyptic horror is a natural genre; I mean, swap out the rats for zombies and you've got yerself something mainstream. (And guess what, this movie steals settings and scenarios from Night of the Living Dead.) There are plenty of horror music cues and rotten, half-eaten corpses to go around, plus that delicious ending, but in the end there's a lot of emphasis on the action of fighting off the rats, and also, on the comedy. As we've seen, Claudio Fragasso had a distinct obsession with writing absurd dialogue, up to and through the time that he made Troll 2. And Bruno just kept giving him more leash. I mean, they must have been making some money together, even if it never showed up onscreen. And as such, Rats is a conversational nightmare, fraught with bad lines delivered so poorly it's hard to imagine there wasn't some desire to raise laughs.

Really, how do you explain the scene where the black girl--sigh; her name is Chocolate--gets flour dumped all over her. She starts jumping around, excitedly exclaiming, "I'm white! I'm whiter than all of you!" Then, one of the New Primitives comes across a bunch of rats falling into their water purifier. "Mangy beasts," he says. "That's how our waters get...pahlluted!" Have I talked about this before? Even if I have, it bears repeating. I'm sure I've never mentioned the line, "Computers and corpses are a bad mixture." There are also Ax 'Em-esque sequences of large crowds screaming that go on for such a long time that I can't believe they aren't played for laughs. Then, finally, there's the scene where the leader, Kurt, puts one of the rat victims out of his misery with a flamethrower. I'm pretty sure that there are much more humane ways of killing someone whose flesh has been bitten off than roasting them alive. Incompletely roasting them alive, I should add, as this poor soul lives for several more minutes after being set on fire! I know there's such a thing as the Idiot Ball, but this is fucking ridiculous.

Did Bruno and Claudio read Jack Kirby's Forever People comics or something? There's something about a gang of motorcycle-mounted youngsters having over-ecstatic adventures laden with hilariously unrealistic dialogue that really strikes a familiar chord with me. Of course, these kids don't have superpowers, unless you count Video, who has the power to restore power to computers by pressing random switches.

Yes, I did say "Video." It's astonishing, but I can almost remember all the main characters' names. There's Kurt, the leader, with his scarf and leather jacket; his girlfriend, Diana; Duke, who wants to overthrow Kurt as head of the Primitives; Video, who is a tech wiz; Chocolate, the black girl and heroine of the film; Lilith, the vampire lady; Lucifer, her boyfriend; and there's the bald guy with the third-eye tattoo (a descendant of the girl from Infrasexum, no doubt), and there's also the kind of nerdy guy who gets killed by the water-purifier rats. I should know Bald Guy's name because he almost makes it to the end. But alas, I guess this just means I'll have to watch it again.

So I guess this is also a Power of Friendship movie on top of everything else. Except Friendship doesn't really prevail in the end, does it? Because Chocolate and Video are finally found by masked survivors who are seemingly a group of saviors coming to help them; they poison the rats and save them from the poison in turn. But then it turns out they are Rat People. Huh. Throughout most of the movie, the characters give a strangely human quality to the rats, which may be a remnant of this perhaps having once been a zombie script--maybe Bruno realized that humanization, and decided to make the full jump? In any case, this ending is weird and painfully open. Are the rat-human hybrids friendly? Did they record some of the messages that the Primitives heard earlier in the abandoned buildings? If they can speak English, why do they refuse to communicate with the survivors? Are they mutated rats who have taken on a human-like shape, or are they humans who have adapted by becoming rat-like? Fucking Christ! Why did this movie get no sequel?

Sequel or no sequel though, I don't think I've yet seen a post-apocalyptic movie better than this one. This is quintessential Eurotrash, quintessential Bruno, and quintessential after-the-endsploitation. What have you got to lose?

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Terminator II (1989), by Bruno Mattei

Where would we be without Bruno?

I think I've talked before about how my life hasn't exactly been...normal, as far as movies go. I hate self-exceptionalism and all who believe in it, but ever since my aunt and uncle showed me I Eat Your Skin at the tender age of ten, I have had an issue with prioritizing "good" movies over trash flicks. Off the top of my head, some of the classic movies I have not seen are: The Godfather, The Shawshank Redemption, Saturday Night Fever, GoldenEye, Mean Girls, Breakfast at Tiffany's, American Psycho, Superman III, and last but not least, Aliens. It's worth pointing out that I have seen Terminator and Terminator 2. And now, I have also seen Terminator II. Except Terminator II is not Italian trashmaster Bruno Mattei's attempt at sequelizing James Cameron's robot-action tour-de-force, though Cameron is certainly present here. No, today it is Cameron's Aliens that falls under the auspices of Bruno Mattei and Claudio "Troll 2" Fragasso. At some point in my life, I know I will become a non-loser and watch Aliens, but because of my experiences today, I will have the inverse view of most folks: to me, Aliens will be the pale shadow of Terminator II, the one I saw first. And I think there's a little validity in my point. After all, James Cameron is no Mattei, nor is he any Fragasso--he is too anchored, too straightforward. Let's let the maestro work.

In the not-too-distant future, at a point where Venice has sunk into the sea, a group of Marines is sent into an underground tunnel network/genetics lab. They are joined by one of the mercenaries employed by the owner of the lab, the astonishingly-named Tubular Corporation. Shortly after learning that something with that name exists in this universe, we find out these Marines are called "Megaforce"! After many wonderful lines of dialogue, they learn that the lab was wiped out by a not-Xenomorph created by Tubular to spread some sort of genetic virus that rewrites an organism like computer code. This is also confusingly tied to pollution, a theme that also appears in Rats: Night of Terror ("You mangy beasts! That's how the water gets...POLLUTED!") and Zombi 3. Of course, the Tubular mercenary is revealed to secretly be an evil android, which I know happens in at least one of the Alien movies. And, naturally, once he is revealed to be an android, he starts doing an Ahnold impression, right down to ripping part of his face off a la the eye-removal scene in the first Terminator. There is a happy ending to this one, for both not-Ripley, and the obligatory child-played-by-a-30-year-old.

The typical Mattei/Fragasso nuttiness is all present here. Even outside of casting moms as ten-year-olds, and all of the flimsy rip-offs of other films, and the presumably-stolen soundtrack, there is wave after wave of beautiful scripting that ties it all together. "Alright, you bunch of pussies," says Koster, one of the three women in this film. "I'm back, and I'm kicking ass!" This is the first thing she ever says to us in the movie, so we don't know what she's "back" from. Terminator II's script also echoes Hell of the Living Dead with a scene where people are dying/screaming for help, and everyone around them just sits around and stares at them grimly as they die. In fact, it's even worse than when it happens in Hell, because at least in that movie, the bystanders at least seemed concerned for the people being horribly killed by monsters. I may have mentioned how Zombi 3 seems to be a "lazy" movie--people move, talk, and live slowly, and don't really seem to enjoy putting effort into doing things like "keeping themselves and their friends alive." Perhaps it shows that Bruno himself was slowing down as he aged. Who knows? Who cares? It's entertaining!

I considered writing a big long paragraph about how the second half of it is dull. Guess what, the second half of every Mattei film is dull. It is an unfortunate truth. This is one is duller than the others, probably because it's a pretty chromatically dark film. And because I'm not above cheap shots, I suppose I can say that you'll like this movie if you're a fan of Man of Steel. Zing-o!

As a side-note/conclusion: this is the second bootleg Alien sequel I've seen. I have also watched the obnoxiously boring Alien 2: On Earth, a movie that's apparently received some acclaim recently, enough for it to get a snazzy Blu-Ray release. My copy is a bootleg pulling together two separate bootlegs to ensure the entire thing is in English. I'll probably only be able to get an HD version of Terminator II when all our brains are resurrected in a supercomputer in the future. That's okay. I'll take slime over substance any day, when Bruno is at the helm.

Zombi 3 (1988), by Lucio Fulci and Bruno Mattei

This is a convergence of divine proportions! Bruno Mattei and the Zombi series. Yes, while Hell of the Living Dead has sometimes been called Zombi 8, this is Bruno's crack at an official entry. But joining the convergence is gore mastermind Lucio Fulci, who made Zombi 2, among countless other movies generally perceived as "better" that Bruno's. And while he may have only directed a few of the scenes in this movie, his presence means Zombi 3 now has prestige. Ironically, Zombi 3 is even clumsier than Hell of the Living Dead, meaning that it has virtually no prestige at all. The sloppiness of Zombi 3, however, is its ultimate charm. So lazy of a film is it that it gains a charisma is that is distinctly Mattei's.

Somewhere on an island a group of scientists are researching something called "Death One," apparently part of a bringing-the-dead-back-to-life experiment. Of course, this works too well and when there is a fault at the laboratory people start turning into zombies. And, a group of soldiers is brought in to clean them up, with great death and horror abounding. Sound familiar? Zombi 3 essentially is a remake of Hell of the Living Dead, but it is almost a caricature of that earlier effort--as remakes have a tendency to be. As always we must turn to the Events to highlight why this movie is so charming. It is full of these little Happenings that make the movie unravel itself quickly. Case in point: the zombie infection returns after the soldiers kill all the zombies, because they bury most of the zombies in a mass grave, but insist on burning the original infectee...for...some reason. The ashes infect some birds and the birds infect the humans. General Morton, the military asshole responsible, says the idea of ashes falling back to Earth is "pure science fiction." There's also the scene where the soldiers find the original zombie, and conveniently there is a clothesline in front of his face so they can jerk it back and reveal that--gasp--he is now a zombie. Except this clothesline only has one or two thin rags of fabric on it, directly in the center, as if they couldn't afford enough clothing to make the clothesline look like anything that's not just a prop for this shocking reveal.

That's not even getting into the severed zombie head that comes to life and flies out of a refrigerator to bite someone.

The dialogue, being written by Claudio Fragasso, is of course excellent. There's a DJ named Blue Heart who acts like a stereotypical '70s black man--in the late '80s! Says a Marine of Blue Heart: "Man, I love this Blue Heart music when I'm coked up! It's makin' me horny!" You will become a Blue Heart fan by the time the movie's over, if anything because he keeps interrupting the film to give pro-eco messages. I feel like this was supposed to be related to the plot, but the zombies aren't caused by pollution, they're caused by a virus. Except halfway through the movie, they mention a "radioactive cloud"...I dunno. In any case, the revelation of this cloud is also marked by the best line delivery in the film: "There are reports...of...murder!...and...and people are eating each other!" Admittedly, though, the true star of this film is the head scientist, whose dub actor must have had a real rough time. The actor apparently insisted on putting lengthy pauses between each of his words, in order to take time to milk the giant invisible cow. Which means that every few syllables the dub actor had to stop, wait for the guy he was dubbing to stop chewing scenery, and then continue. He works well with what he's got, giving the guy a frantic and frustrated voice.

Weirdly enough, the movie ends with an extremely dramatic sequence where one of the Marines misses the escape helicopter, and fights off dozens of zombies, only to be mistaken for one of the ghouls and shot down. Of course, because there is absolutely no character development in this movie, there is no emotion in this--only the imitation thereof. Everything in this, from the action, to the dialogue, to the editing, is only an imitation of what real movies do. We have a chance to watch an unreal movie. Bathe in its blandness.

Indeed, blandness, in the most fascinating sense, is the focus here. If you are expecting anything new at all to the zombie concept--except for maybe flying severed heads--don't cross these premises. The zombies are slow and stagger around, and while some of them talk or use weapons, they're largely there to snack en masse on the designated dead characters, or to be blown to pieces by guns and explosions. Zombi 3 flirts nervously with the action genre, instead trying mostly to be a sci-fi thriller or horror film. There are some odd action-hero moments at the end that, to my mind, come from a different movie. Maybe it was that the characters were saying something defined, rather than flat and hilarious. God, and Bruno, alone possess the answers.

Zombi 3 suffers somewhat if you haven't familiarized yourself with Hell of the Living Dead. At least, I assume so. If you do watch these movies with this one first, let me know how it goes. The good news is...both are wonderful.

Hell of the Living Dead (1980), by Bruno Mattei

Every few months I am inevitably called back to the directing work of Bruno Mattei and the writing work of Claudio Fragasso. This usually means I rewatch SS Girls for the billionth time. Last week I dove into Caligula Reincarnated as Nero, which was amusing but off-putting in the same way Women's Prison Massacre was, minus that last valuable sliver of entertainment. It was a depressing experience. I guess that just shows that sometimes you gotta stick with the classics.

Hell of the Living Dead is a classic. I've heard a few different folks say that it may well be the most incompetently made zombie film of all time. That is almost certainly true, though movies like Night of Horror still exist. It steals many scenes, ideas, and musical scores from movies like Dawn of the Dead, so originality is not its forte, but all the same, Hell sustains itself itself on not merely being a zombie movie. In my mind it succeeds at being a zombie flick, with an occasional dose of impressive atmosphere. But it's also an adventure film, an action film, a tribalsploitation film, and it has a dose of...real animal violence, to boot. Anyway, it's an exploitation film through and through, with all those elements churning in its greasy, grubby mix.

A lab is working on something called "Operation Sweet Death," which actually turns out to have an interesting dark secret behind it in the ending. What matters for now is that Sweet Death is a gas that turns people into zombies. This is released accidentally by two scientists who talk about whether they are tit men or ass men. The exchange in which they bring this up shows that every line in this movie is going to be solid gold. Next we see a group of Marines break into a building that is under the control of some ecoterrorists who want to expose Sweet Death. As one of them dies, he whispers: "You're all doomed to a horrible death. Doomed...to be eaten up. You will be killed...and then eaten. Eaten by men who were once your brothers..." That's how I talk, in Real Life. Anyway. The Marines then go on a long journey wherein they gain and lose numbers to the zombies, eventually stumbling across a village where an unbearably interminable stretch of exploitation stock footage rolls by, including a long scene of a crocodile being butchered* and an elderly nude woman eating maggots out of the eye socket of a corpse. Let me tell you, jumping from the rollicking comedy of Fragasso's dialogue to a fucking Mondo film is jarring. The end will shock you, or at the very least, make you kinda sad.

The dialogue here is key. There are a lot of weird one-liners in this movie. Namely, the Marines joke about necrophilia and quip lines like:

"Maybe there'll be chicks in grass skirts."
"Maybe there'll be some without grass skirts."

Genius. Fans of Troll 2 will feel right at home.

Let's see. What else do I love about this movie...?

-A zombie priest shows up who is played by Victor "Marty Feldman" Israel from The Witches' Mountain
-"Maybe they're just drunk or drugged. Or they're a leper colony. I don't think they intend to harm anyone." The man who says this, the news photographer, looks like Mario the news photographer from The Witches' Mountain.
-Zantoro. The "crazy" Marine. Watch the movie just for him. There is no explanation. Also, his name is Zantoro.
-Bruno Mattei has no idea how to dub black people. This is a pattern that continues into this film's remake, Zombi 3.
-This movie was remade as Zombi 3.
-This movie was also released as Zombi 8 even though it was made eight years prior to Zombi 3.
-There is a zombie lady who is full of cats.
-The soundtrack is stolen from Goblin's soundtrack to Dawn of the Dead due to a contract loophole for Dawn regarding Italian film law at the time. Perhaps, just as Women's Prison Massacre gave Claudio Fragasso's connection to Laura Gemser for the fashion sense that went into Troll 2, this movie's cribbing of Goblin led to his decision for what race his "Trolls" belonged to.
-The soundtrack is also stolen ex libris Joe d'Amato.

That's...basically it. This is probably the best Mattei movie to start with. If you can stomach this, SS Girls and Zombi 3 will open up to you. Gee, I wonder what the next movie I'll talk about will be...

---

* My personal copy of the film doesn't contain this scene. The first time I saw the movie, when it did contain this scene, it was admittedly a bootleg on YouTube. I think it's safe to say that whoever uploaded the now-missing YouTube version edited this footage in from another source. Ick. In any case I've left this reference in as a warning to those who may stumble across the same bootleg. It's best to just get it from a legitimate source.

SS Girls (1977), by Bruno Mattei

Recently, as Adam Mudman's A-List has come up on around thirty posts, I've gone back and reflected on what I've presented these last few months, and in doing so, I've tried to think of ways to make this blog relatable while also fulfilling my eternal mission of relaying the alien qualities of the movies I tend to highlight. After all, weirdness obtains greatness primarily in the context of normalcy, as insufferable as that context can be. In essence, I need to compare more of these movies to movies you're likely to have ever seen, like The Great Escape and Salon Kitty. Okay, there's a smaller chance you've seen Salon Kitty, which is unfortunate given that SS Girls (or Private House of the SS, I guess) is basically a remake of that. Except it's made by Bruno Mattei, he of Women's Prison Massacre and Hell of the Living Dead, and so this is like The Great Escape if there were prostitutes, blood-drinking, and Gabriele Carrara.

Brilliant and shining Gabriele Carrara! He is the star of this film, as he plays enthusiastic Nazi fanatic Hans Schellenberg. The line in the sand is drawn at him--there's no point in making comparisons from here on it. By merit of its star, SS Girls transcends any sort of expectations one can have for a World War II film.

It's 1945, and the Wehrmacht has been invaded by a buncha lousy Hitler-haters. The SS employs Hans Schellenberg to rip the truth out of five officers suspected of a plot to betray the Fuhrer, and so with the aid of Frau Inge and Professor Jurgen, Schellenberg acquires a group of prostitutes who are swiftly conditioned for any sort of sex, unnatural or otherwise, and likewise honed to physical perfection. Schellenberg then invites the officers to a proper Third Reich orgy, where people do all sorts of things that I'm sure the Nazis really did at their orgies, like lick wine off of people. As this occurs, Herr Schellenberg climaxes while playing the organ, and caresses nipples creepily but never does the deed himself. The plot succeeds and the officers, in throes of passion, confess to hating Hitler. They are put on trial by Schellenberg dressed in a Nazi Pope uniform, and promptly disposed of. Movies over, right? Of course not! We haven't yet gotten to see the next batch of officers Schellenberg and his girls are given to work on, including a blood-drinking guy and a Japanese Nazi with a Swastika drawn in permanent marker on his dishcloth headband. So it goes.

Claudio Fragasso wrote this, and so basically it's the same type of dialogue you'll see in Troll 2. Despite the subject matter, it surprisingly doesn't have someone exclaim, "They're eating her! And then they're going to eat me!" But instead, we do get gems like a quip by General von Kluger, the eyepatch-Nazi: "I may only have one eye but I've seen the orders and it's a fact...we're abouta get more pussy than we can handle." If you've seen any Italian movie from the '70s or '80s you will hear the same voice cast/accents, and it will be like coming home. No one is a European, and no one is as excited as Gabriele Carrara's dub actor, who, judging from the flawlessness of the performance, may well have been Carrara himself.

It truly is Carrara who makes the entire thing dodge any description but "operatic." I'm sorry, I know that's a pretentious thing to say, but this is the kind of acting I feel I need fancy glasses to watch. Perhaps Schellenberg himself says it best when he says, "It's almost like a play...that's it...a play." This line is followed immediately by his snarfing down a mouthful of roast chicken, clearly representative of the scenery. Either Carrara was a secret acting genius whose great talent allowed him to produce such a confusing performance (he only appeared elsewhere in Mattei's Women's Camp 119 and a Mondo flick called Mutant Sexual Behaviour), or he believed this was how Nazis really acted, and he believed in realism so much he was willing to die for it. The man does basically kill himself throwing his body and voice into the level of camp to which he stoops. I've never seen anything even fucking close to it.

Fortunately, it is generally comparable to other Nazisploitation movies, at least on the surface. There's the sex aspect, and gross sex at that. Schellenberg's girls learn to screw German shepherds and circus freaks in scenes that will make you cringe, then laugh your heart out. It's not Joe D'Amato at the wheel, so everything's softcore and none of the ghastly stuff is real. But at the edges of this seemingly normal abnormal sexuality is something greater. A normal Nazisploitation film wouldn't include a scene of a Little Person SS Officer lip-syncing to the Headless Horseman's laugh in the 1949 Disney Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Nor would it feature a scene in which a Nazi Pope shrieks "Am I funny, huh? Am I funny, huh?!" at a crowd of confused onlookers. So even if you have entered the deep levels of Nazisploitation and that has become your norm, this is even farther away. Farewell, Great Escape, I guess.

SS Girls is marred by one of the traditional faults of Nazisploitation, which is tedium. After the first and second batches of traitorous Third Reich Benedict Arnolds are done away with, we're left with a long half-hour in which the brothel reacts to news of Hitler's death. Not much of interest happens here, but that's okay. As long as we have that first hour, all will be well. The world will keep being a better place.

I was introduced to this movie about six months ago, but it feels like I've known it for lifetimes. The images strung together that make this movie are so random and wild that they always come out of nowhere, even when I know they're on their way. It's so relieving that this is emblematic of most of Mattei's movies, even some of his crasser and grosser ones.

And here, I started by saying that I wanted to take about being relatable. I chose a poor movie for the job, given that it's best measured in degrees of inverse relatability. Basically: take everything you know about a World War II movie. Then, translate your understanding of those movies into an equivalent amount of confusion and unfamiliarity. From there do everything you can to accept that anti-comprehension. Once you do accept it--you'll be free to laugh endlessly.

I can't say I'll be able to promise grounding and stability the next time around. My tastes have become too distorted for that. But again, if you can turn yourself inside out, you will find a great bliss. Bruno Mattei will guide you down this Stygian river more smoothly than anyone else, so if you can stand a lot of boobs, a lot of dubs, and a lot of tasteless exploitation, spend an evening with this one.

Women's Prison Massacre (1983), by Bruno Mattei

"I'm not a part of this performance. I represent the captive audience. And what I want to know is: how can you suffer it? It makes me wanna throw up!"

Bruno Mattei was an international man of mystery. Many of his films will end up here eventually: SS Girls, Hell of the Living Dead, Rats: Night of Terror, and Zombi 3 have entered the ranks of some of my favorite movies of all time. As associate of Lucio Fulci, and a partner of the infamous Claudio Fragasso, Mattei explored genuine and heartfelt low-tier art in the context of extreme bottom-budget trash filmmaking. His movies aren't emotionally riveting, but they often tend to be comedic boons to all who watch, carrying sincere aesthetic interest. Of course, he made plenty of shit, just as his fellow cinematic superstar Jess Franco did in addition to his own great films.  

By being a Bruno Mattei movie, Women's Prison Massacre is already at risk, and is, in fact, doubly screwed: yep, it's part of the Black Emanuelle series starring Laura Gemser. I have only seen one Gemser Emanuelle film, and that was Joe D'Amato's Emanuelle in America. That movie had a scene where someone masturbated a horse. Scrubbed my computer after that one. You can expect that I had some degree of apprehension when wading into one of Mattei's cracks at the series, which, by the way, is a series much in the same way that all of the various in-name sequels to Fulci's Zombi (like Mattei's Zombi 3) are a series. However, I learned quickly that I would not be led astray, for lo and behold, this movie opens with a woman giving a monologue about how she calls herself "The Mantis." THE MANTIS. The Mark of Mattei is upon us. Joy to the world!

The usual Bruno stuff is here. There's at least one person with crazy eyes. People are simultaneously offended and excited by sex, of which there is a lot. The editing and effects make most of the violence cartoonish. And, naturally, everyone speaks with the ludicrous intensity of a Grant Morrison comic. "I hope...you can prove that claim!!" the warden mugs, after her guards torture some lesbians. "Can you not...prove the contrary?!?" Emanuelle snaps back.

Speaking of Emanuelle, Mattei's protagonists (or "protagonists") are always awesome--the post-apocalyptic hippie bikers from Rats, Zantoro from Hell of the Living Dead, and especially Hans Schellenberg from SS Girls are all impressive slabs of perplexing OTT ham whose dub actors should be given monuments. Emanuelle, of course, is not a Mattei original, but she keeps a badass stony face and makes us feel bad for her when she gets tortured. In this one, she's a reporter who was supposed to investigate the titular prison, but, of course, ends up becoming a prisoner in it, which one must admit is rather the twist, assuming this is the only movie involving a prison that one has ever watched. There are weird cutaways from the prison scenes to who I think is either the owner of the prisoner or Emanuelle's boss, who is shady and very pro-death penalty. Then, there are some male prisoners who end up in the women's prison, who give us zingers like this:

Prisoner 1: "If I didn't have these cuffs on me, I'd stick that gun up your ass!"
Prisoner 2: "No, that's too easy--and he might enjoy it! That'd be a real shame, huh?"

Unfortunately, I can't properly convey how the delivery is both inappropriately casual and unnecessarily dramatic. Like I said--monuments, please.

Actually, the male prisoner subplot leads into this movie's very important message: don't use a vehicle transporting prisoners to lead a raid on a terrorist organization. It's okay, though, because surprisingly the prisoners do not escape, and as far as I know the terrorists do not return to the movie. The convicts are instead placed in the women's prison, despite the fact that all of them are rapists. In addition, despite this fact, they are portrayed as jolly, goofy comedians, at least until they very easily kill a guard and seize control of the prison. However, with a few gruesome exceptions, there is naught but more cartoonishness ahead. The disturbing stuff (which should be obvious enough) is scored with proto-techno/post-disco beebops, and intercut with scenes of a Nazi forcing a woman to dance with a blow-up doll. It can be a really upsetting movie--I'll be the first to admit that I'm triggered by depictions of rape, and so I did have to fast forward quite a bit in that second half. And, trust me, lots of particular words with certain histories to 'em are thrown against the ladies, because it's a Women in Prison movie. That's something you just gotta blink over, I'm afraid. Ultimately, if you feel prepared or are content skipping around, the surrounding scenes are sweet 'n' surreal.

I have to admit, I'd rather watch SS Girls or Hell of the Living Dead than this, which is also how I feel about Rats: Night of Terror. But this is still definitely a favorite. And hey, it really is two movies in one: after all, it ends with a sped-up recap of all of the ostensibly important events.

So yes, there was some suffering. But for things like that, I didn't throw up.

P.S. Claudio Fragasso was 2nd unit director on this. I'm guessing he worked with Laura Gemser before, but I like to think that this was the movie where Fragasso just said, "Someday I'll make a movie about vegetarian goblins. And I want you to make the costumes for these goblins." Then she winked at him: "I have some potato sacks which'll do the job just fine."