Tropical Inferno
Dir: Jess Franco
The government of an unnamed South American country fights the rebels with every tool at their disposal, even torture. Two of the deadliest tools are Loba (Dora MANIAC KILLER Doll) the commandant of a women's prison and her lover / partner in pain Dr. Milton (Howard 'of course I'll be in your next film Jess' Vernon). Dr Milton has just arrived back in the country after a self imposed exile of three years when the former regime disagreed with his proclivities. Acting on a tip that three women are being smuggled via truck to meet up with the rebels, they set a roadblock. A squad of soldiers from the prison intercept a fruit truck and discover a number of women hiding in crates. Loba and Milton only care about three of the women, Aida (Aida Gouveia), Karine (Karine Gambier) and Barbara (Esther Studer). The rest of the women are given to the guards to be raped.
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| Don't look at the camera, don't look at the camera...D'oh! |
The women are taken to the prison and chained up by the neck inside the cell block of the title. One by one they are interrogated by Loba and the bad Doc and grilled as to the location of the rebels. The Doc employs torture methods as electro shock, lowering a naked chained woman onto a saw horse with sharpened steel plate overlays and a wooden horn repeatedly rammed into the vagina (the doc comments that most of the men he subjected to the horn became homosexuals). Another woman, Maria (Susan Hemingway), after being forced to perform cunnilingus on Loba, joins the naked and shackled women of cell block 9. Knowing that death at the hands of Loba and the doc is not far off, the women put on a lesbian act for a befuddled soldier, take him out with a couple of poorly performed karate chops to the neck, and make their escape into the jungle. Naked and weaponless. Loba, the Doc and soldiers track the escapees. The women's inevitable, gruesome deaths have only been postponed.
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| Loba has a go at the prisoners |
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| Annie got her gun |
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| Amazing special effects |
There are Jess Franco films that I've enjoyed watching, THE BLOODY JUDGE, VAMPYROS LESBOS and its fantastic score and I'm willing to admit the man has talent. WOMEN is not one of those films. It falls into the category of sleep inducing tedium along with THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU and everything I've seen that Franco directed after FACELESS. The signature Franco out of focus shots, close ups of female pubic hair and scenes that run far too long without a cut away can all be found. As most of the cast worked with Franco on his other epics from around the same time I would not be surprised to find out that Franco filmed WOMEN on days off from another film.
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| Can't even tell that's stock footage! |
Dull.
* out of ****
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