It was Labor Day weekend in 1971, the end of summer and the beginning of the long haul to Christmas. It was a traditional dead zone for the theatre business. School was back in, Friday night football for the teens, the new television season was beginning and so it was a struggle to find audiences ... box office results would go into a down-cycle after the summer rush.
But on this particular Labor Day weekend a nothing sexploitation film would open in theatres and set off a fire storm of interest. It was filmed in the Philippines on a micro budget, but everything clicked … it was a blessing for theatre owners and the first of a series of women-in-prison films that would end up creating its own cult sub-genre.
Of course, we are talking about director Jack Hill’s Big Doll House, starring a new arrival by the name of Pam Greer. She had a small part in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and that was it. Now she suddenly found herself, not in Hollywood, but making a movie in Manila … clearly, this is a career-ender.
It was anything but that and now a newly minted, digitally-remastered DVD edition will be heading home from MVD Entertainment Group on Dec. 7 … the perfect “stocking-stuffer!!”
Also in the cast are Judy Brown (Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off, Willie Dynamite, Psychic Killer) and Pat Woodell, who had played Bobbie Jo Bradley in the Petticoat Junction sitcom series, but was now reduced to playing a prisoner in a sexploitation film in the Philippines (she stuck around the Philippines to co-star with John Ashley in The Twilight People, returned to the United States and landed the lead in Class of ’74, was Heather in director Arthur Marks’ 1973 hit, The Roommates … and then retired from the movie business).
Others in the cast include Roberta Collins, another actress just starring out and now in the Philippines doing a certain-to-be career-ending sexploitation film. Instead, it launched her career, she too would stick around for Women in Cages, join fellow cast-member Pat Woodell in The Roommates, then came Caged Heat, the cult-status role of Matilda the Hun in Paul Bartel’s 1975 classic, Death Race 2000, Eaten Alive would follow and she shinned as Lana in Hardbodies.
There are two others of note, the died-too-young Kathryn Loder (Foxy Brown) as the sadistic Lucian, the warden, and this odd-looking fellow by the name of Harry, who sells “supplies” to the prisoners … it was none other than genre-fan favorite, the late Sig Haig!!
The film is exactly what it seems to be. A women-in-prison sexploitation thriller, loaded with violence, kinky sex and more kinky sex. But it works like a charm and created career-making opportunities for this “all-star” cast. A classic!
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