ILSA WICKED WARDEN

The infamous "Ilsa" movies starring Dyanne Thorne are often remembered as a trilogy (She Wolf, Harem Keeper and Tigress). The ILSA WICKED WARDEN movie (directed and starring that exploitation scoundrel Jess Franco) is commonly cited as being the "unofficial" entry into the series. This is most likely due to the fact the movie was originally released as Greta - Haus ohne Männer or Greta the Mad Butcher. Other titles include Greta The Torturer, Wanda The Wicked Warden, Ilsa-Ultimate Power, Ilsa-Ultimate Torture, Ilsa Ultimate Perversion and so on and so forth!

It is my humble opinion however that if a Grindhouse flick stars Ms Thorne as the gloriously sexy authoritarian dishing out her own twisted brand of rehabilitation and experimentation, to call it anything BUT an "Ilsa" movie would be pointless. ILSA WICKED WARDEN was made back in 1977 and is given another digital release through those purveyors of trash, Cheezy Flicks.

The narrative is simple enough. Abbie Phillips (Tania Busselier) knows her sister Rosa was committed to Las Polomas, an institute dedicated to treating female patients for various sexual anomalies including prostitution, lesbianism (!!) and nymphomania. In truth it’s a women’s prison and Abbie believes something heinous has become her sibling. As such she sees fit to hold Dr Arcos (Franco) at gun point and have him draft a false referral that allows Abbie to enter the prison for a month to expose her sister’s predicament.

Upon entering Las Polomas she encounters some depraved characters. Juana played by Mrs Franco, Lina Romay, is the ring leader of the inmates and the clandestine sexual plaything to the institute’s female tyrannical boss Ilsa (Thorne) Or is that Greta, or Wanda. Well it doesn’t really matter as her name is never used in the dialogue which is either a stroke of luck or a cunning move by the producers permitting the aforementioned multiple titles!

It’s strange place whose inmates are made up of a post op transsexual Karla, a worse for wear blonde girl who’s sole task in the movie is to vacantly sing "Frère Jacques" and a few ‘vegetables’ being rolled around in wheelchairs!

There is a dubious subplot whereby the inmates are filmed in various states of sexual degradation by Ilsa’s sole male assistant, Drago (Erik Falk), enabling the institute to profit from a little porn peddling on the side. But such a voyeuristic market yearns for more hardcore offerings which leaves Drago in somewhat of a dilemma as to how to achieve this...

The closer Abbie gets to uncovering her sisters fate, the more suspicious the wardens get of her bogus identity. With tensions in the prison running high, an inmate revolt on the horizon and the need for some more hardcore movies there can only be one conclusion… can’t there?

Ok so the movie is far from being a classic BUT that’s not to say you can’t have a bit of fun with it. Thorne is at her camped up and vindictive best throughout and does indulge in the odd sordid romp with Ms Romay. That’s a thumbs up from me folks!

Karla the foul mouthed transsexual is a joy to behold whenever she opens her… I mean his… I mean her mouth. Whether it’s cursing her knitting needles or lewdly explaining how she "used to have a huge cock" its exploitation dubbed dialogue at its finest. Her killer line has to be when she finally cracks at the incessant rendition of "Frère Jacques": "...take your brother, jack him off and shove him up your stinking ass!" I concur whole heartedly!

The DVD cover boasts the print is "Digitally Remastered", and it does shine through with some vibrant colours throughout. The flagrant display of flesh is full of life and the exterior scenes of the "banana republic" are green and lush. As for Dyanne Thorne’s mouth that distends across the 16:9 widescreen, a more succulent luscious pair of red lips you will NOT find!

So that’s the good news. But it’s another, rather erroneous claim, from the back cover that needs to be addressed. Yes the DVD has been rated "R" (enough in itself to get the alarm bells ringing when seeking an uncut print) but the cover notes DO allude to a 95 minute runtime.

As with a lot of films of this ilk, various versions and run times are available. The longest runtime of the movie I could find is an apparently uncut print weighing in at 94 minutes and 15 seconds. The actual runtime of CF’s disc clocks in at a paltry 84minutes and 17 seconds. Even if you add the extras chapter to this, (6 minutes of trailers) the run time falls way short of the quoted 95 minutes, so what is missing? This puzzlement was enough to bring out the geek in me I have to confess!

I reran the CF disc on my TV in tandem with an uncut version of the movie on my laptop. Such a rudimentary method of comparison is not suitable for an exhaustive list of cuts but here are my main findings…

The main problem it would seem is the full frontal nudity. Various shower sequences have been trimmed including when the guards hosepipe Abbie down initially. Not too bad so far. But then a catfight scene in the shower with flailing legs (and alas pubic areas on show) was also truncated. Not so good. This "bush censorship", so to speak, was taken to the extreme as the movie progressed. Whenever there was frontal nudity on show, the scene was completely removed. It culminated in some essential pieces of dialogue being omitted for the mere fact that, in the background, there was an out of focus pussy shot!

Now I am not Jess Franco’s biggest fan and his plots are nonsensical at the best of times, but when an effort his being made to tie up loose ends in the story and develop characters, and those scenes are crudely edited out, it renders the Cheezy Flicks version completely unsatisfactory.

What was curiously UNCUT in the Cheezy disc was all of the sexual violence in the movie, including the fully intact infamous "human toilet paper" scene. ("Use your mouth to clean my coolo…!!!") Are we to deduce that shit licking, a breast being used as a pin cushion, rape en masse, acid being injected up a vagina is acceptable but a few frames of hairy pubic mounds is just a step too far??? Weird!

The climax itself also suffered at the hands of the censors scissors. It was comparable to the Frank Zito’s fate in MANIAC. But Franco obviously didn’t have the luxury of Tom Savini at the helm for special effects so simply intercut some footage of Big Cats tearing their prey’s flesh off the bone with the inmates’ revolt. This scene has again been severely edited in the CF edition making it seem even more ludicrous then the uncut version. If it’s any consolation, this is a Franco movie and his desire to use a pink spongy substance for flesh hardly made it an ultra-realistic gory sequence anyway!

If you are looking at a cheap way to sample the movie, the Cheezy Flicks disc may well do the job at a budget price. Personally though, I would rather pay £15 for an uncut movie, as oppose to £5 for a movie that has been so grotesquely censored.

Review by Marc Lissenburg