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DJ Supply

Big Doll House: Digitally Remastered
(Roberta Collins, Christiane Schmidtmer, Judith Brown, Sid Haig, Pam Grier, et al / DVD / NR / (1971) 2021 / MVD Visual)

Overview: Famed exploitation director Jack Hill (Spider Baby, Foxy Brown) directs this alternately brutal and campy look at desperate women behind bars.

Pam Grier (Jackie Brown) joins a group of sexy young female prisoners in their struggle against an abusive and sadistic warden in Big Doll House.

DVD Verdict: The Big Doll House pretty much sets the template for the whole WIP genre, with the introduction of several new prisoners to a banana republic women’s jail where the head warder abuses trouble-makers for the amusement of the wicked governess.

After experiencing the suffering first-hand, the (ridiculously attractive) inmates of one cell decide to make a break for freedom.

Director Jack Hill’s film treads a fine line between straight up exploitation and tongue in cheek fun: it’s nowhere near as harsh as the average European WIP flick, but not quite as camp as Hill’s follow up, The Big Bird Cage, which emphasized the absurdity of the genre in a more playful manner.

Hence, we get an assortment of relatively light torture scenes (including that WIP favorite, electrodes on the breasts) and some bloody violence (the sudden death of one central character is particularly harrowing), all of which is mixed in with such lighter nonsense as a mess hall food fight, a spot of mud-wrestling, and the exploits of a pair of randy male fruit-sellers who dream of scoring with the banged-up birds!

With plenty of gratuitous nudity from the gorgeous gals (whose numbers include blaxploitation legend Pam Grier and Death Race 2000 babe Roberta Collins), another fun turn from Hill regular Sid Haig, and a surprisingly down-beat ending that sees all of the escapees either shot or recaptured, this is a very enjoyable slice of exploitation from one of the genre’s most dependable film-makers (Hill also gave us the excellent offbeat black-comedy/horror Spider Baby, and Grier blaxploitation classics Coffy and Foxy Brown).

This is a now Digitally Remastered Widescreen Presentation (1.85:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs.

www.MVDvisual.com





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