HOUSE OF CRUEL DOLLS (1974)
Label: Full Moon Features
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: Unrated
Duration: 91 Minutes
Audio: English Dolby Digital 2.0 and 5.1 (No Subtitles)
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.85:1)
Director: Pierre Chevalier
Cast: Sandra Julien, Silvia Solar, Magda Mundari, Jack Taylor, Olivier Mathot, Claude Boisson, Gillian Gill, Sandra Julien, Raymond Schettino
From the dusty vaults of Eurociné comes the sleazy z-grade pastiche of sexploitation sleaze fused with re-dubbed footage from other films, most notably the obscure 60's spy-thriller Agente Sigma 3: Mission Goldwather (1967). Its quite a slap dash effort but stars quite a few noteworthy Eurocult players and there's plenty of softcore roughie-styled nudity that should appeal to fans of Jess Franco WIP flicks and roughie style sex-slave sexploitation stuff like The Rape of Virgin Girls (1983).
Also known as The House of Lost Dolls, this horny hybrid features new scenes filmed by Pierre Chevalier (Panther Squad) to tell the sordid tale of Yvette (Magda Mundari), a white slave prostitute who is freed from her captors thanks to help from a frequent client Mr. Gaston (Raymond Schettino), who seems to have fallen in love with her. He sneaks her out of the brothel and they take off in his car with her captors giving a half-assed attempt to recapture her. They lose the pursuer pretty quick considering the sluggish pace of the scape, and only a few minutes later pull off to the side of the road to make love (as you do), before eventually making their way to the cops. There she spills the beans about her kidnapping and forced sex-slavery, which all began when she accepted a ride from a creep in a dune buggy, bad idea.
Then we have Eurocult superstar Jack Taylor (Female Vampire) as a secret agent named Marc sent to bust the sex-trafficking ring, all of this is re-dubbed footage shoehorned in from the Gianpaolo Callegari directed '60s spy thriller Agente Sigma 3: Mission Goldwather, as he sets about infiltrating the operations of flesh-peddling white slavers Mr. Raski (Olivier Mathot, Cecilia) and Sylvia (Sylvia Solar, Cannibal Terror), who employ sleazy guys to procure women, kidnap them and sneak them onto a cargo ship in wicker baskets, where they are abused and raped by some poorly dubbed henchmen, one of them played by Claude Boisson, Shining Sex), before ending up at the house of ill repute from the opening of the film, which is run by Madame Zozo (Gillian Gill, Village Girls). The flick also features looker Sandra Julien (The Shiver of the Vampires) as a deep-cover spy embedded at the brothel.
The stitched-in spy-action scenarios with Taylor are pretty cut-rate, we get a car chase wherein Taylor's character grabs a handful of nails from the glove-box and throws them over his shoulder to derail the pursuit, and the physical altercations aren't much better staged, but it's cool to see a young Taylor and the whole flick is dripping with nudity of the softcore roughie variety, and for some that might be enough to merit a watch, it certainly was for me. The way the flick is assembled with recycled footage and new-dubbing is pretty atrocious to be fair, I kept getting lost trying to keep up with the it, every time there was a random nude scene I would forget what the hell was going on (and that's probably a good thing), but as a cheap spectacle of sexploitation and a mind-melting mash-up, I thought it was a fairly entertaining roughie-romp.
Audio/Video: House of Cruel Dolls (1974) arrives on region-free Blu-ray from Full Moon Features in 1080p HD widescreen (1.85:1), advertised being fully uncut and remastered from the original negative. Its in great shape and while there does appear to be some light filtering of grain I thought it was a reasonably crisp looking with good colors. Audio comes by way of English Dolby Digital 2.0 and 5.1 with no subtitles options. The English dubbing is good for a laugh but sounds decent enough, I preferred the 2.0 option as opposed to the surround, which sounds fairly weak. The only extra is a 9-min collection of Eurocine trailers.
Special Features:
- Eurocine Trailers: House of Cruel Dolls (2 min), Naked Girl Murdered in the Park (1 min), Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun (3 min), Satanic Sisters (1 min), Voodoo Passion (1 min), Women in Cellblock 9 (1 min)
Full Moon's ongoing Eurociné Collection has been a fun dive into the vaults of the distributor, and this is one of the weirder entries for sure, and that's saying something! It might not be a great film but it's an entertaining slice of slapdash Eurotrash with mismatched frankenstein'd footage and a super-flimsy excuse for a plot; but if you get your exploitation kicks watching naked women being groped and abused by seedy guys it's got lots of that.
Screenshots from the Full Moon Blu-ray:
