The Big Doll House (1971)

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thestuman101694
Great!! I loved every minute of it! 12 years 3 months ago
Siskoid
Pam Grier's first women in prison movie is The Big Doll House, but it isn't HER movie. It's not anybody's movie. It has an ensemble cast and lots of little stories going on that resolve with an attempt at escaping the Filipino prison (are these things all in the Philippines? I feel like director Jack Hill, Grier, Sid Haig, etc. once spent a summer there filming a dozen of these). So it's a bit of a hodgepodge of the usual tropes - you've got shower scenes, and food fights, and some mud wrestling, and the evil lesbian captain of the guards, the warden looking for love, the snitch, the girl whose man (a revolutionary) is waiting for her on the outside, the new girl, and the junky (Brooke Mills, who I thought gave one of the most interesting performances - but you also have some truly weird stuff, like a torture dungeon that looks like it was cobbled up by a mad scientist. Also not sure about Pam Grier singing the theme tune. The ending is almost objectionable, but is then interrupted by wild action, but finally heads for a dubbed-in punchline that falls a little flat. All that to say that there's always something going on and it's never boring, even if it does allow your attention to wander just as its own does. 3 years 8 months ago