The Big Doll House
by Jack Hill
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Brooke Mills, Judith M. Brown, Pam Grier, Pat Woodell, Roberta CollinsDirector: Jack Hill
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
Picture Format: Academy Ratio, 1.33:1
Running Time: 93 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-04-27
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: New Concorde
Movie Reviews of The Big Doll House
Movie Review: You got catfights, the "hot box," whippings, food fights, electric shocks, ...
Summary: 4 Stars
At times, you don't know exactly how silly this is supposed to be, and the whole film has a tone of naivety in spite of its run of sex and violence (with drug addiction thrown in for good measure). The plot couldn't be more simple: a group of women in prison, led by the resourceful Collier (top-billed Judy Brown), plan an escape. Inside snitch Grear (Pam Grier in her first speaking film role) slips information back and forth to the guards and the evil warden, Ms. Dietrich (a hilarious Christiane Schmidtmer, best remembered for The Giant Spider Invasion), in order to get smack for her lesbian lover cellmate. Guards torment and molest prisoners. Prisoners get naked (though not as much as you'd expect for this genre). One evil head guard, Lucian (Kathryn Lodern, the quasi-Bette Davis villainess from Foxy Brown) tortures bad girls by tying them to tables and hanging snakes over them. With the aid of guard Sid Haig, the girls eventually the girls stage a big, violent breakout which claims a few lives and leads to a riotous, over the top sequence in the middle of the jungle.
The Big Doll House has a small place in exploitation cinema history as it was the one whose success sparked off the women in prison cycle of the nineteen-seventies. Fast paced and surprisingly well acted, The Big Doll House takes itself more seriously than its semi-sequel, The Big Bird Cage, and delivers all the usual thrills you would expect, though a few witty lines and some hysterical monologues (the one about the husband and the poolboy is priceless) indicate the filmmakers already knew how to keep their tongues firmly in cheek. As if that weren't enough, you also get a theme song, "Long Time Woman," performed by Pam Grier herself (and later reused in Jackie Brown).
Big Doll House was shot on less than optimum materials in the Philippines, thanks to the producer wishes of Filipino scholock experts Eddie Romero and John Ashley (Mad Doctor of Blood Island), so this edition is about as good as it's going to look. Sound quality is fine if a bit ragged in spots due to the recording techniques, and the disc is well compressed and contains no noticeable artifacts (wrinkles). Watch it irony-free, and feel the love.
Summary of The Big Doll House
Director Jack Hill, a prot?g? 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 RenshawAction & Adventure DVD Video
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