Product description

The Big Doll House [1971]

Price: £3.24
RRP: £5.99
Average customer rating: 3.5

Binding : DVD
EAN : 5014293133852
Label : Prism Leisure
Manufacturer : Prism Leisure
Publisher : Prism Leisure
Release date : 2003-07-28
Title : The Big Doll House [1971]
Actor : Array
Audience rating : Suitable for 18 years and over
Format : PAL
Languages : Array
Number of items : 1
Original release date : 1971-01-01
Region code : 2
Running time : 89
Studio : Prism Leisure
Theatrical releaseDate : 1971
Number of discs : 1

Customer reviews

review by: A New Yorker date: 2007-09-27 rating:

You got catfights, the "hot box," whippings, food fights, electric shocks, ...
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.

review by: ss265 date: 2004-11-29 rating:

What the hell?
I bought this film after almost dying with laughter watching the trailer on the Jackie Brown DVD. I had to buy it because it looked so amazingly rubbish.
In a way it is, but in a way its pretty good. Sid Haig and Pam Grier star in a bizarre women's only prison camp in some central american republic. All I can say is that political correctness was not at the top of the director's wish list. The story is pretty basic, but has an amazing twist at the end which you don't expect.
If you like watching crap films, then possibly buy this. If you don't like watching anything other than blockbusters never buy this film, it will only satisfy the most strange of us

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