Greta, the Mad Butcher (1979)

I like ugly films, that aren't sterile and prettified by superficial gloss. This leads me into a lot of shady areas, because the spotless, empty media we do have is utterly retarded & absolutely everywhere. I'll happily stand for the movies that use this tangibility in entirely negative ways. If something makes me feel like showering after and praying to Jesus while I rock to & fro- mission accomplished. Even if it's repulsive & indefensible, it's still alive. If I'm going to watch movies I want to feel this stuff, not be pillow talked by processed slop. I open like this because this flick is surely one of those shows that makes you ponder taking a pumice stone to your eyeballs. Hallelujah. Make no mistake, Jess Franco is dye-in-the-wool pervert & not shy about it. He obviously has an…affinity for the material that makes for a creepy sort of dedication. He isn't joking with his sick WIP cycle, they aren't easy to laugh off like the others I've seen.The gloriously tacky ILSA series is consistent in its portrait of the inquisitor madam & her devotion to pain- glamorous, beautiful, power loving & sexually insatiable, one moment smooth & pleasing and the next sadistically merciless- but it hops back n forth all through the 20th century, from hot spot to hot spot, drawn to evil like a fly to dung. It helps to jettison any idea of chronology here & just think of Ilsa as a kind of vampire, popping up wherever there's bad vibes to leech on a massive scale; deposed & killed in one era and rising in another to feed again- you can't keep a good woman down. Her first adventure was the exploitation classic SHE WOLF OF THE SS, where Ilsa found herself right at home with the goose stepping jackboots of the Third Reich, then HAREM KEEPER OF THE OIL SHEIKS where she frolicked in a desert hellhole, onto the TIGRESS OF SIBERIA which found Ilsa getting up to her old tricks in the gulags of Soviet Russia & finally here- running a banana republic asylum in typical hands-on style. Dyanne Thorne's third reprisal of the blood thirsty succubus is a grind house goody, but only viewers blessed with strong constitutions need bother. It isn't the typical Chicks-in- chains enterprise that a trash mongrel expects, where bad taste is balanced by rival factors like low production values, wooden acting or camp sensibility (HAREM KEEPER).It includes the standard ingredients the genre demands yet takes them so far out that those deflating factors aren't enough to dampen the stench. I've read the charge that this jaunt down debauchery lane might've been a firecracker in its day but the preceding three decades have softened its bite. no no NOAs the movie's titular warden, Ilsa reigns supreme over a mental hospital for deviant women. While the inmates have full frontal romps in filthy public showers with butch lesbo guards leering on, Ilsa relaxes after a long day of depravity at the office, sinking her generous bosoms in a luxuriant bubble bath, inter-cut with a prisoner gunned down while trying to escape sans underwear (no inmate here is permitted the privilege of undergarments- yea, that's the level were on here). This prompts the victim's sister Abby to have herself committed to expose the goings down at Las Palamas before more innocents die at the hands of our sadistic bitch goddess and her lackeys. Predictably, Ilsa's magic touch has transformed the hospital into a den of twisted sex games, a gulag for political prisoners, a snuff movie production house. Got all that?What a gust of foul air. The bottom barrel method captures every sq mm of grime, minimalistic compared to the last two; slow but vicious. They were colourful and this is low-key & subdued: a slow burn. It sure floored me, sneaking the Anchor Bay reissue during my teenage years & imagining the delicious horrors that waited. Finally I would see a Jess Franco movie, one of those reviled raunch-o-ramas; a real test of my mettle. Non stop nudity, acid douches, human toilet paper, electro shock therapy, whippings, beatings, rapes- yeah, we're not in Kansas anymore Toto. Sigh.The constant barrage of dehumanization is numbing & any technical deficiencies just get swallowed up by the atmosphere of jaw dropping mean spiritedness. Just that general atmosphere of extreme human backwardness can hurt your head after awhile. Again, Jess Franco takes the skeleton of old comic book adventures/exotic serials & injects all his usual sexual sickness into it. Dyanne Thorne's hammy accent is not so yuck-worthy when she's holding a plastic bag over someone's skull or jamming needles close-up into flesh; I never feel more like I'm wading through the twisted jerk-off fantasies of a pulp obsessed teenager than during Franco's WIP stuff. It's a cartoon shot with porno flatness to authentically capture the intensity of S&M.After the tongue-in-cheek approach of its predecessor the randy little Spaniard takes the series back to its roots: undiluted in-your-face shock value, with a heavier emphasis on eroticism only un-softened by any of his usual dreamy proclivities, save one scene. What we're left with is a bleak parade of suffering, extreme sleaze only amplified by the crude, dingy realization of the material. Jess puts all other WIP movies to shame: its not light naughty fun; its pervy uncle,goose-you- under-the-dinner table uncomfortable. Standout image here: a woman being calmly asphyxiated by Ilsa, the bag over her face inflated by death rattles as her eyes bulge. Ugh. This will be what stays with me from THE WICKED WARDEN. People with bags over their heads are just plain horrifying; they've been reduced to giant veal cutlets in a special way.

This movie is boring, you can no longer expect to make movies interesting only by showing actresses in the nude. It doesn't work anymore. What exactly people see in Franco movies is beyond comprehension. He really is a terrible director doing crap movies. For the reviewer who says he wants all Franco movies : don't do that to yourself I'm sure you don't deserve it. And besides remember he made a lot of them so beware ! It doesn't qualify as a Ilsa movie which is fair enough if you consider it's in fact not really one but it's only a tedious WIP film that has stupid dialogs and no plot. It just drags along to reach its end since the script is based only on this final scene. Too bad Franco directed it in such a ridiculous way !

WICKED WARDEN is my least favorite of the "infamous" ILSA series. Granted there are some pretty sleazy moments (after all, Jess Franco DID direct the film...) but I just couldn't get into this one. This one finds the torpedo-tittied Ilsa as a warden at a prison for disturbed young ladies...Plenty of soft core tits-and-ass, and a few "torture" scenes, but nothing really to write home about. A few classic scenes (the post-doody-forced-ass-licking comes to mind...) but all-in-all, more of an Italian softcore sleazy sex film. If you really dig Franco's other stuff, or that genre of films in general, you'll probably really feel this one. Personally, I prefer more "extreme" sex and violence in my exploit films, and this one didn't really deliver. Check out SHE WOLF or TIGRESS for a better experience in the Ilsa series, HAREM KEEPER isn't too bad either. 5/10 for WICKED WARDEN

Today, I watched another 2 Jess Franco titles from the Anchor Bay UK 8-Disc Set (which I rented from my local DVD outlet): ILSA, THE WICKED WARDEN (1977) and JACK THE RIPPER*** (1976).Though I wouldn't say that ILSA is exactly a good film, I was still quite surprised by how it managed to hold my interest throughout. Not that it made particularly inspired use of the various subtexts suggested in the script (the snuff movie angle, for instance, is not dealt with in any depth) – apart from its over-the-top, and undeniably horrific, conclusion – but it was certainly above-average for an Erwin C. Dietrich production with adequate scenery, an evocative if repetitive score and competent performances. The dialogue of the German-language version, however, was pretty hilarious (the various odes to Greta/Ilsa recited by the inmates, the sanitation officials who arrive for a surprise inspection complaining that the rumors of the supposedly corrupt management inside the prison are unfounded – for obvious reasons, they may not have been taken to see the dungeons where the female convicts are tortured, but did they even question themselves why these were forbidden the use of underwear while serving their sentence?!); still, the English dubbing (heard during the interview section of the supplements) makes it sound even worse!I haven't seen the 'original' Ilsa films but, while Dyanne Thorne seemed to be relatively at ease inhabiting the Jess Franco movieworld, I also feel that her character was pretty one-dimensional and not really the main focus of the film; Lina Romay, on the other hand, has a lot of fun with one of her better roles; even Tania Busselier (in her third and last film for Franco) seems to have matured somewhat and here makes for a creditable heroine (for whom Franco boldly reserves an unexpected tragic fate, though this was perhaps done so as not to involve her in the film's cannibalistic climax).Unfortunately, this edition was cut by more than 2 minutes by the BBFC: the death-by-asphyxiation of Rosa Philips was evidently trimmed as it now occurs in a split-second; I may be wrong but I reckon that the remainder of the censored footage involved the lobotomy performed on the Tania Busselier character (did they even show this?) as her sudden appearance as a 'vegetable' is most jarring…Anyway, I look forward now to renting and watching another of Franco's notorious 'Women-In-Prison' films for Dietrich, namely BARBED WIRE DOLLS (1975).