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WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE
Directed by Gilbert Roussel (Bruno Mattei)
Written by Claudio Fragasso and Olivier Lefait
Edited by Gilbert Kikoine
Director of Photography - Henry FrogerEmanuelle - Laura Gemser
Crazy Boy - Gabriele Tinti
Ursula Flores
Maria Romano
Antonella Giacomini
Had I screened this before Barak Epstein's PRISON A-GO-GO, I might have found that movie funnier and Bruno Mattei's WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE less so. Mattei's cult favorite is filled with all the sleaze Epstein so gleefully mocks.
WPM opens with a strange set of poetry that comes across like performance art, where the "good" girls expound on their rage at how the world sees them, such as "The Whore Irene", as well as their sense of womanhood by being locked in jail. There are three women speaking, among them is the beautiful Laura Gemser playing a variation of her Emanuelle role, and they are lit in such a way their half their faces are glowing green, like a jester--Perhaps this represents an internal duality that stems from their situation. To stay alive they present an aura of toughness and essentially loose their femininity, but to retain their sense of self they must come to terms with their irony of their situation and remember that they still have feminine needs.
The bad girls of the cellblock disrupt the performance in a form of one-upmanship to show superiority. Not satisfied with giving a simple beatdown, the bad girls resort to humiliation by throwing tomatoes at Emanuelle and her group. This seems to be a common thread in this type of picture: humiliation. It could be argued that this sort of thing is misogynist, but the atrocities are girl on girl. One could take into consideration the audience to whom these sort of films are intended - males - and view the acts as a passive form of misogyny as the men vicariously exercise their fetish through the movie.
In theory, an exploitation film isn't exploiting the participants, which is how some short-sighted people view events, by I'd argue that it's the audience being exploited. It's their fetish that the filmmakers are playing upon in order to bilk viewers out of their money. Why else would anyone make a movie where women torture one another and beat each other to bloody pulps; humiliate and beat each other these women do. They make vile threats about biting nipples off, and when threats won't work, things get dirty. These women choke, stab, and drown their fellow inmates while the jailers sit back and view events as a form of crowd control. When wrongly imprisoned Emanuelle fights back, the guards take on a more active role in setting her up for confrontations with The Bad Girls. On the rare occasions when the guards do have to get their hands dirty, they seem to prefer drowning their victims in the sink so as not to leave marks that can incriminate themselves.
It's interesting to view the cultural differences in this Italian women in prison flick. Any viewer of OZ knows that sex is a form of empowerment in jail, and isn't looked down upon as it once was. Even in a recent episode of THE SOPRANOS, when speaking about same-sex relationships in jail, Tony Soprano tells his shrink "you get a pass on that." In a place as hardened as prison, the longing for companionship and tenderness isn't merely a feminine need but an all encompassing human need. Early on in WPM, two women are found being intimate in the lavatory. The other women look on in fascination, and then disgust, as they report those being intimate to the guards who quickly start dunking the lover's heads in the sink. The expression on the lovers' faces says that they know what goes on in the cells once the lights go out, why must they be persecuted for showing their genuine affection during the day?
The dynamics of the movie shift once men are introduced into the dichotomy. No matter how brutal events were before their arrival, viewers haven't seen anything yet. The addition of 4 male deathrow inmates means now rape is part of the equation. They instantly take over the prison and reduce its female authorities to hostages. If anything, this is a completely feminist view on male aggressiveness. The only good men are killed off quickly, or left for dead. Even the D.A. who is overseeing the hostage situation from outside the jail is just another male scumbag - he's the reason Emanuelle was framed. As a reporter, she was investigating a political trail of drugs and got to close to the truth.
At this point, the women are all playing for the same team and the game of one-upmanship is now a battle of the sexes, and both sides sink to some serious depravity as they emasculate and effeminate one another. It's interesting how director Mattei reduces men and women to their anatomy. Once a person's genitalia has been violated they possess no gender and aren't worth living. Viewers questioning this notion will want to pay particular attention to the razor blade rape.
There's no denying the level of perversity that Mettei sinks, and I'm at odds on whether there's any subtext is intentional or not. Sometimes people read into these things in hopes of legitimizing them, and I'm not all that different. Sometimes people just don't want to see the sleaze for what it is: Sleaze. And man, oh, man, WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE is overflowing with it.
The dvd for WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE contains only the film and a trailer vault. The print for the transfer is marred with scratches, but still looks better than most stills I've seen taken from older vhs editions.