Entry 116: The Women in Cell Block 7 (1973)

The Women in Cell Block 7

Dir: Rino Di Silvestro

"What makes a nice girl die in a place like this?"

   

I'm on vacation!  That's right, dear reader, for the next 30-odd hours, I'm faced with precisely ZERO responsibilities!  What am I gonna do with myself?  If you guessed "have a couple of stiff drinks and watch some movies"  you're fuckin' A right!

Alright, me and this movie have a goddamn relationship.  You younger readers won't remember this but, back in the early '90's, Comedy Central was called The Comedy Channel and it was infinitely cooler than it was now.  In addition to great shows like the Seattle-based sketch comedy show Almost Live, The Kids in the Hall, Supercar and (*Ahem!*) Mystery Science Theatre 3000, the network would occasionally show random exploitation movie trailers in between scheduled programs.  A trailer for this film (the specific version of which, sadly, I couldn't find to link) was one of those and, with it's images of badass babes rioting, tearing each others' clothes off and, through the magic of editing, seeming to burn a man alive immediately caught my attention.  This is COOL, I thought.  I was roughly 10 years old at the time, which probably explains a lot.  

When a movie’s title card is displayed before a frozen image of a rubber-clad finger and it’s opening credits play out during a female-on-female rectal/vaginal exam, you know EXACTLY what kinda flick you’re in for!  If you’re a normal person, you probably turn it off in disgust...If you’re me, you grab hold of your seat and enjoy the fuckin’ ride!  After the credits, this movie begins as a typical Eurocrime flick, with mobsters trying to out-muscle each other leading to a pretty goddamn fantastic car chase, in which stunt drivers careen through the narrow streets of Florence with reckless abandon.  Wrecked at the end of the chase, Masumeci (Paola Senatore, Eaten Alive, Salon Kitty) is taken prisoner by rival mafioso.  We’re then introduced to Masumeci’s daughter Hilda (Anita Strindberg from Fulci’s Lizard in a Woman’s Skin), who goes undercover in the titular cell block in an attempt to get information from Daniela (Jenny Tamburi, star of another Fulci flick, The Psychic), the incarcerated girlfriend of one of her father’s enforcers.  Daniela may know the location of a “shitload” of missing heroin; if Hilda can discover its location before INTERPOL, she might save her father from a life of imprisonment.  While Masumeci ends up murdered by his kidnappers (which also leads to pissed-off mobsters burning bungling enforcer Louie alive in an oven, leading to the scene in the aforementioned trailer that made the greatest impact on my young mind), Hilda bears witness to/participates in several WIP tropes: bare-breasted shower sex, clothes-ripping exercise yard catfights, sleazy male prison staff making advances, shiv-stabbings, etc.  The film climaxes in a ridiculous/awesome riot in which the inmates tear their clothes off, only to have the guards turn the fire hoses on them.  These turn out, naturally, to have all the pressure of garden hoses and the girls prance around in the gentle stream to the benefit of the (presumably male) audience.  After this, it limps to a (surprisingly) downbeat conclusion.

Women in Cell Block 7 is a pretty typical WIP film; it has all of the expected nudity, but features neither the brutality and hardcore sex of some of it's European competitors, nor the attitude of it's AIP-produced American counterparts (I'll take Pam Grier in The Big Bird Cage or Black Mama, White Mama over these bland Euro-trash beauties any day).  That said, the less-scrupulous viewer will be pleased by it's copious nudity (though the sex scenes are strictly softcore) and I was kept entertained by it's always creative and pithy dialogue ("Up your ass, you bitch!  I still say you're a whore!" "Get back in the sack, you rotten lesbo!").  If it isn't a classic of the genre, Women in Cell Block 7  is never less than entertaining, and I can't deny it it's role in leading me to where I am today (such lofty heights, eh?).  I don't think my 10 year-old self would've been completely disappointed.