The Big Doll House

The Big Doll House_360P

Trailer—The Big Doll House

The Big Doll House

Jack Hill has always been a master of turning such a controversial subject (especially at that time) into a fine film. The Big Doll House stars Judy Brown, who is taken to a prison on some remote island where she is accompanied by other jailbirds: Pam Grier, Brooke Mills, and Roberta Collins. Grier and Collins are driving forces throughout the film and seem to double-handedly run the entire joint. While Mills plays everybody's favorite psycho junkie, making an art out of hallucinating. Sid Haig is the dominating warden who uses poisonous local snakes to torture the prisoners. The movie ends with Grier, Mills, and Collins dying and Brown being captured and taken back to prison. Definitely an acquired taste and compulsory for fans of old skool "Women Torture and Revenge Tales!"

So says one of the denizens of the "big doll house" to a man from the outside who has come to make deliveries but gets more than he bargained for....The Big Doll House is exploitation with a capital X, made in the peak period for such stuff by the redoubtable Jack Hill and starring future cult blaxploitation actress Pam Grier. Shot in the Phillipines, clearly on next-to-no-budget, this is good cheesy fun, women in prison with a lesbian/Nazi guard and a couple of fumbling good ol' hippie-boys (one of them played by cult actor Sid Haig, in an early performance back when he was thin, had hair and came off as an oily ladies' man) who help them out at the most opportune moment. The acting's pretty mediocre, though Grier is just awful here and you get the sense that this film and some of her other early work could have killed her career if not for other...uhh...assets. Hilarious shoot-out ending, awful stunts and effects, lots of bright red paint, I mean blood....

Collier (Judith Brown) is a new inmate in a foreign tropical prison. Alcott and Grear (Pam Grier) are two of her cellmates. This is a Roger Corman women-in-prison B-movie filmed in the Philippines. It delivers what it delivers. It is certainly not a good movie. It has women in literal hanging cages. It's *. It's a lot groping. It's prison lesbians and sadistic guards. It's generally a mess but I don't think it matters to its intended audience.

It's a Women In Prison movie set in an unnamed tropical country where Judy Brown, Roberta Collins, Pam Grier and Brooke Mills are up for 99 years at hard labor, for crimes against the state. The prison personnel all have vaguely Mitteleuropean accents, people get stabbed without reacting, Pam Grier has not yet learned to act, and there's a kitty-cat which runs errands. There are mini-skirts for prisoner's clothes, topless scenes, some rather desultory torture, and you get to see Sid Haig in his skivvies. This was the sort of movie teen-aged boys snuck out of the house, lied about their ages, and were mildly disappointed in back in the day. Then they would lie to their friends about how cool it was. While they might have seen Judy Brown's breasts (twice!), they'd know that any movie in which a cat is trained to fetch and carry is nonsense.

Big Doll House, The (1971) ** (out of 4) Beautiful women, catfights, food fights, torture, lesbianism, mud wrestling and nudity are the highlights of this cult classic Women in Prison film from Jack Hill. There's always a slight bit of sleaze that makes this interesting but overall it's pretty dull without enough story and the dramatic moments don't work. Judy Brown and Pam Grier star. It should also be noted that I prefer the rougher women in prison films by the likes of Jess Franco. Franco started this genre with 99 Women but I prefer his darker WIP films like Barbed Wire Dolls, Women in Cell Block 9 and Sadomania.

I look at the negative reviews of this movie and I have to ask myself: what did these people think they were going to see? "Titanic"?" "Gone With The Wind?" "Driving Miss Daisy?" I judge movies by how much I enjoy them, and - honestly, I can't think of a movie that has more entertainment crammed into it than this movie. It has everything you could possibly think of...and more. At first you enjoy the cheesy aspect of the movie and laugh, but then you start caring about the characters...and you HAVE to see how it ends. Oh and while I'm talking about this picture I want to say something about Roberta Collins: even though most people you talk to won't even recognize her name, she was a talented and underrated actress...a natural comedienne. This film, along with the Jonathan Demme helmed "Caged Heat," show what she was capable of. I highly recommend both of these films if you enjoy movies under the heading of "Exploitation." ROGER CORMAN RULES!!!

Two factors make THE BIG DOLL HOUSE a must-see, Women In Prison classic: Factor #1- It's directed by none other than cult film maestro, Jack Hill! Factor #2- It stars the one and only cult goddess supreme, Pam Grier! This is sheer, unabashed exploitation done right. All of the requisite parts are in place- blazing hot female inmates, fascistic guards, a psychopathic warden, corrupt military figures, sadistic torture, and endless nudity. If that's not enough, it also features Sid Haig as an unscrupulous fruit vendor! Plus: mud wrestling, a massive food fight, and sudsy-sudsy shower fun! Accept no substitutes...