Island Women
Switzerland/France 1979. Director: Erwin C. Dietrich
Cast: Brigitte Lahaie, Karine Gambier, Nadine Pascal, France Lomay
Aka: Gefangene Frauen

Island Women is one of Swiss producer Erwin Dietrich's best known titles. Which probably only means that it has been given a proper video release somewhere, instead of just turning up at some adult movie theater downtown. Anyhow, the story, is, as expected, kept to a minimum. It's the women-in-prison standard plot. But Dietrich is a skilled veteran of exploitation cinema and knows that if the movie looks good and has lots of gratuitous nudity it'll be alright anyway. About the plot now. Somewhere in South America a couple of prostitutes (ladies of the night) are arrested by the military and taken to a prison island. The usual stuff follows; nudity, group sex, showers, nude wrestling, nude whipping, more showers and a commandant in leather gere (Karin Gambier). And only in a Dietrich movie (well, perhaps not only) would three inmates escape butt nude by crawling under barbed-wire fence, in close-up, to freedom in the beautiful mountains chased by a guy in beard. The wicked commandant is later captured by revolutionaries and sent back to her own prison. There's a funny anecdot about the shooting of this film and Six Swedes on a Campus featuring mostly the same cast, of how Dietrich loved to see his nude actresses run (something about the beauty of moving breasts) so he kept them running as much as possible even if he didn't use it in the films. Good? Not really. Bad? Definitely not. It's not as violent or depraved as Jess Franco's similar movies for Dietrich the producer (Frauen Gefängnis bla bla), which is a good thing, so it's a quite safe watch. Fairly enjoyable with a better than average photography and an attractive cast (actually, any cast featuring Brigitte Lahaie is a good cast). Fans of the genre has suffered worse and are advised to check it out.

© The Inzomniac's Movie Madness Review.