Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Steineded How sad is this?

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Paul Andrews 99 Women starts as a small boatload of women arrive at an unnamed island to be become prisoners of Governor Santos (Herbert Lom) & chief warden Madame Diaz (Mercedes McCambridge) in a state prison known as the 'Castle of Death', amongst them is the pretty blonde Marie (Maria Rohm) who pleads her innocence. Branded inmate number 99 this is how Marie is to be known from now on, after trying to help a fellow inmate the warden decides number 99 needs punishing, meanwhile a kind hearted investigator from the mainland named Leonie Carrol (Maria Schell) is sent to the prison to root out corruption & abuse but Governor Santos is on to a good thing & doesn't intend to let Carrol spoil it. Marie decides to escape & along with another couple of inmates manages to make it into the harsh jungles but things aren't much better out there than inside the prison...This English, Lichtenstein, German, Italian & Spanish co-production was written & directed by the prolific Jesus Franco whom I consider to be one of the two worst filmmakers in the horror & sleaze genre, I'm sorry but I just find virtually all of his films absolutely worthless & even worse mind numbingly boring & badly made. Lets take the abomination that is 99 Women as an example, at almost an hour & forty minutes this feels twice as long & for a film where virtually nothing happens 99 Women is slow going & I was throughly bored by it. Hell, I started to play some games on my phone about an hour in I was so bored. The story is crap, the dialogue is awful & the character's are cardboard thin. As an early example of the Women in Prison genre 99 Women really doesn't hold up, the location used looks more like a vineyard, there's no shower scene & little in the way of genuine sleaze. The script tries it's hand at a bit of drama with the plight of the abused women & the most dull prison escape ever filmed. People just don't act like people, people don't talk like people & there's not enough sleaze here to make this watchable, another worthless piece of crap from Franco who has his admirers & fans but for the life of me I can't see why.The whole look of 99 Women is dull, some of the locations are nice but do not look anything like a prison & the way the women wear shirts but not much else means I never got the Women in Prison vibe from this at all. Surprisingly light on nudity & sex there's not a great deal of violence either although Franco manages to include a scene where a woman attacks & stabs a Snake despite it just laying on the floor doing no-one any harm, it would have been quicker & easier & safer is the woman had just stepped over it or walked around it, you know? To be honest I can't really remember much about this, it just sort of went in one ear & straight out the other if you know what I mean with no impact on me at all. The mythical French version includes hardcore sex scenes featuring people not in the rest of the film having sex in places not in the rest of the film.Apparently filmed in Valencia in Spain this cheap film features lots of ugly zooms & really boring shots that Franco holds for ages, the editing is also bad with character's jumping around all over the place with the final riot at the end the best (or worst) example of this. The women here really aren't that good looking although a couple are attractive enough I suppose, Herbert Lom deserved better than this.99 Women is more crap from cult director Franco but this time there isn't even any sleaze or violence to make it bearable (unless you watch the badly edited French hardcore version) & is yet another film by Franco that I can honestly say I hated. The sort of film that makes me want to give up watching films altogether.

hasosch On the American market, two basic trends can be observed nowadays: First the sustained lack of availability of monumental German as well as general European films, second the flooding with cheap editions of even cheaper film elaborates for which even the plastic of the DVD is wasted."Jess" Francos work belongs to the second category. After World World II, the film industry lay down in Germany. The good directors were either dead or in the US, successors were not in sight. The people was lacking even its basics. However: Panem Et Circenses! Bread and Plays! Simultaneously with the Adenauer era which supplied the starving people with bread and sausage, the German film industry set wholly on entertainment. The 4 main branches, that had been cultivated, were: 1. The "Heimatfilm" (maudlin Melo-Dramas). 2. The "Schlagerfilm" (Schlager musicals), 3. The "Lederhosenfilm" (rustic, blunt and outspoken sex(-Ploitation) movies in the era of German Pre-liberalization (vide: "Schulmädchenreport" and the like), and 4. "Krimi" (thrillers compared to which Grimm's fairy tales are startling).When the liberalization of sexuality came, towards the end of the 60ies, there was a sensible shortcut in "apt" directors who could handle these smeary, sleazy and grimy concoctions. Ulli Lommel belonged to those who tried, but the Spaniard Jesus Franco filled in the blank. In a sheer endless series he produced crap over crap, manure over manure, feces over feces (for which, in 2009, he awarded the Goya-Price by the Spanish King). Well understood: Germany in the film landscape of the 60ies - that was sex and crime, Heimat and Wirtschaftswunder, crap and dilettantism. At exactly the same time, e.g., in France, directors like Godard, Rohmer, Truffaut, Eustache, Chabrol, Rivette, Melville a.o. worked with actors like Belmondo, Brialy, Anna Karina, Lafont, Leaud, Jeanne Moreau, Piccoli, Jean Seberg. Not to speak about the US, where despite the Big War there always has been continuous high-level film work.Would there not have come the Big Release from all that manure - and it came in the person of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who mucked out the German Augias Stall beginning at approximately 1966 - one could hardly imagine what would have happened. But such movies like "Der Heisse Tod"/"99 Women" (1969) still stand here in the now historic landscape like monuments of an epoch when the level of the German film sank below zero. This does, however, not legitimate anybody to put such dung onto DVD. Can one really hold anything against that once famous film critique who said that the new German film did not only start with Fassbinder, but also ended with him?

Michael_Elliott 99 Women (1969) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Director's Cut One of the first WIP (Women in Prison) films deals with an innocent girl (Maria Rohm) being sent to prison where she has run ins with the wicked warden (Mercedes McCambridge) as well as a woman (Maria Schell) out to make the prison a better place. This was directed by Jess Franco who was still in his serious film-making days where he was actually producing higher budgeted, better looking films. The movie is decent enough but I prefer Franco's later, more sleazier efforts like Barbed Wire Dolls, Women in Cellblock 9 and Sadomania.

lazarillo Jesus Franco is one of the few directors in the world who could take a much-maligned genre like the women-in-prison film and make it even sleazier. "Barb-Wire Dolls" would have been unwatchably repugnant were it not so inept, and "Ilsa, the Wicked Warden" WAS unwatchably repugnant despite being equally inept. For that reason, I approached this movie with great trepidation, but was surprised to find it relatively well-made and surprisingly tasteful. The plot is pretty standard. Girls are imprisoned on island--they give them a number and take away their names. Since this was made in the more censorial 60's there is no graphic torture and no showers and the prisoners actually get to wear underwear beneath their prison smocks. Mercedes McCambridge is the harsh warden. Herbert Lom is the corrupt commander of the island who takes sexual liberties with the prisoners. Maria Schell is the well-intentioned but ineffective reformer,. Luciana Paluzzi is the top-billed convict, but she exits quickly and the real stars are Maria Rohm and Rosalba Neri who together lead the big bust out at the end.Relatively speaking this movie had a decent budget and a talented cast, and perhaps because of this (and the aforementioned threat of censorship)Franco had to reign himself in from his usual indulges. (I can just imagine the conversations he would have had with these relatively classy actresses: "No Jesus, I'm NOT going to perform analingus on her masticated rectum, I was a Bond girl for christsakes!"). Not that there isn't any sex or nudity. There is a great catfight/lesbian sex scene between Neri and Rohm as the lascivious Lom looks on, but the action is shot almost entirely in a montage of extreme close-ups (the only time after this that Franco was this circumspect in a sex scene was in "Erotismo" and that was no doubt because he was trying to avoid child porn charges after stupidly casting an underage actress). My favorite scene though is a flashback sequence where Neri does a sexy strip to a flickering candelabra, and in a touch that is both perverse and surreal her audience is a bunch of cigarette-smoking schoolgirls! Of course, there are those Franco aficionados out there who would prefer endless static shots of Lina Romay or somebody rolling around naked on a bed while Franco conducts a gynecological exam with his zoom lens to these much more sedate sex scenes, but there can be little doubt which is more classy and tasteful.The best part though might be the catchy theme song ("Born to Be Bad") that leaves you with a warm feeling of nostalgia for that era (whether you experienced it or not). I don't know if I'd want to watch this movie again, but at least I didn't feel like running for the shower when it was over. If you want to see a Franco a WIP flick this is a good place to start (and also to stop).