Women's Camp 119 (1977), Tortured Angels (1982)

In 2007 I watched two Pam Grier Blaxploitation films (Coffie and Foxie Brown), in preparation for viewing the Tarantino/Rodriguez double feature tribute to low budget exploitive fair: Grindhouse. I enjoyed Grindhouse, as I enjoyed the Grier films, there was something fascinating about them. It was a movie experience not quite like anything I’d seen before, a little seamy, a little shocking, surprisingly gripping, it seemed that anything could happen in a 'Grindhouse' feature. These are the types of film that you could easily label bad, but actually they can be kind of good, you see there’s an art to them, and Tarantino understands that art and has become the biggest main stream name to advocate this ‘underground’ cinema. That’s why when a chance came up to purchase the ‘Grindhouse Experience’, a collection of 20 films from among those Tarantino had selected for the 2007 Los Angeles Grindhouse Festival, I jumped at the chance (for less then $20 I couldn’t say no). Arranged as a series of double features meant to be representative of the various Grindhouse sub-genres, you’ll be seeing a fair amount about these movies on these pages in the coming weeks and months, so now its time to get started:

The first double feature could be classified as the ‘women’s prison’ genera, though actually none of the films presented here perfectly fit that description. The first film, Women’s Camp 119 is an Italian picture about a Nazi facility where various, how shall we say, sexual- type experiments are carried out with a group of lesbians, communists, and prostitutes as unwilling participants. The experiments are things like attempting (unsuccessfully) to transplant uteruses, and to ‘cure’ homosexuality. All of this under the supervision of the very ideologically committed Dr. Franz Wieker. Wieker is one of a number of over-the-top nemeses for the poor woman inmates (none of whom survive interestingly) including their lesbian overseer, a smiling Nazi torturer, and an aggressive retarded man. This is seamy exploitive stuff, yet it is oddly successful at its pretensions of being an exposea of brutal Nazi medical experimentation. At the end of the film, pictures of German men who had committed evil acts of this type, and where at the time of the films release still free, are displayed with brief descriptions of their crimes (including one who invented a kind of portable gas chamber, and one who killed 80,000 Jews). Again this mixture of low brow exploitation, and legitimate sociological commentary, is perplexing and fascinating.

Tortured Angels, aka Strike of the Tortured Angels is a cleaner film (i.e. no nudity) from Hong Kong. It is about three teenage girls who escape from an island camp for troubled youth (they sneak off on the side of the boat that comes to collect the flowers the ‘inmates’ grow for sale on the outside). One of the girls is determined to get revenge on the ambitious and unfeeling doctor who drove her sister to suicide, and who cheated with her mother on her ailing prominent physician father. She wants revenge, but will she sell out her innocent soul to get it? The answer is no, cope out ending has bad guy falling to his death inside a pretty beautiful canyon. Kind of helping the lead girl are a naive, kind of bimboish girl who keeps a small pig as a pet, and an obviously Asian girl whose either suppose to be mixed-race, or is doing the Al Jolson black face shtick (love her Afro). They are all pursued for escaping the island by the handsome and sympathetic councilor/ security officer Mr. Lee. Film feels like there’s five to ten minutes of plot missing. Again these movies being what they are defy my traditional ratings system, suffice it say, they were interesting.