Friday, December 22, 2023

JAILHOUSE WARDRESS (1981) (MVD Classics Blu-ray Review)

JAILHOUSE WARDRESS (1981)

Label: MVD Classics
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: Unrated 
Duration: 75 Minutes 
Audio: English or French DTS-HD MA Mono with Optional English Subtitles
Video: 1080p HD (1.37:1) 
Director: Jess Franco, 
Alain Deruelle
Cast: Jess Franco,
 Lina Romay, Monica Swinn, Paul Müller

Synopsis: Nazi officers flee to Latin America after the 3rd Reich's defeat. While in hiding, they create labs to produce slaves for their own satisfaction. One of the most notorious "women in prison" epics, this Jess Franco production stars Lina Romay (Female Vampire) as Maria da Guerra, who's sentenced to life after killing her father, who had attempted to assault her. While behind bars, Maria encounters a sadistic female warden and hatches an escape plan involving the seduction of a male nurse. Monica Swinn (SHining Sex) and Paul Müller (Eugenie de Sade) also star in this salacious tale.We also get Roger Darton (Women Behind Bars) as the former Nazi who is now governor of the South American women's prison; Nadine Pascal as a prostitute set on a jailbreak;  Beni Cardoso (The Girl from Rio) and Peggy Markoff (Ilsa, the Wicked Warden) as lesbo inmates, and sadly Lina Romay (The Hot Night of Linda) only shows up in a minimal role, but she does share screen time with Jess Franco in a re-dubbed scene. 

Truly a hot-mess of nazisploitation flick with women-in-prison elements, utilizing footage from Barbed Wire Dolls, Hitler's Last Train & Elsa Fraulein SS (aka Captive Women 4) stitched together in an incomprehensible pastiche, this is quite a shameless re-edit from the Eurociné vaults, with re-dubbed dialogue and head-spinning edits that made it a hard flick to follow. The flick is co-credited to Alain Deruelle and Jess Franco, mostly because Franco's Barbed Wire Dolls makes up most of the runtime, and the rest is cobbled together by Deruelle, the director of the absolutely atrocious Cannibal Terror, so that it is such a shit show is no surprise, but that this makes Cannibal Terror shine by comparison is pretty stunning. Skip this and just watch Barbed Wire Dolls, this curio-trash is for Nazisploitation completest and the morbidly curious only.  I am glad that MVD saw fit to make it widely available for the bottom-feeders looking for it though, but be careful what you wish for. 

Audio/Video: Jailhouse Wardress arrives on Blu-ray from MVD looking pretty dang terrible. Obviously sourced from a dated SD master it's VHS quality with debris and artifacts abounding, this is certainly the lower-end of VHS quality at that. 
Audio comes by way of English or French dub in PCM 2.0 mono with Optional English subtitles. Both are imperfect, the re-dubbed scenes are terrible, but both are serviceable. 

The only extras are a selection of Trailers. The single-disc release arrives in  standard keepcase with a single-sided sleeve of artwork. This is a completest collectors and deep-divers only sort of release, a trashy Frankenstein of a nazisploitaion flick that makes very little sense, but does have some cheap thrills for fans of this sort of stuff. 

Special Features:
- Trailers: Jailhouse Wardress, Convoy of Women, Nathalie: Escape from Hell, Golden Temple Amazons, Hudson River Massacre.