In 1971, famed producer Roger Corman gave up and coming director Jack Hill a few girls and a handful of money and sent him off to the Philippines to make a women in prison film on the cheap. The result? Big Doll House, one of the more notorious American women in prison films and one of the films that would help launch the career of a young actress named Pam Grier.

The plot of Big Doll House doesn't differ much from the scores of other women in prison movies that have been made before and since this one played to some pretty impressive box office success at drive-in's and grindhouses across North America. Judy Brown (of Slaughter's Big Rip Off) plays Collier, who teams up with a few other inmates, notably Grear (Pam Grier of Jackie Brown) and Alcott (Roberta Collins of Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive and The Witch From The Sea) to fight off and escape from a sadistic prison warden named Miss Dietrich (Christiane Schmidter of Invasion Of The Giant Spiders) after being tossed into the big house under rather dubious circumstances. After a few nasty set pieces, the showdown reaches its boiling point, and the girls are going to have to use it or lose it to get out of the big house in one piece and with whatever is left of their dignity intact.

While the film isn't going to win any points for originality, at the time it definitely pushed the envelope in terms of what it could get away with. Drug abuse, rape, lesbian antics, and all manner of torture are flaunted in the face of the viewer and even by today's standards, despite the fact that the movie does shoe its age, Big Doll House is strong stuff. Women are bitten by poisonous snakes, slapped around, tied up, thrown in the mud, and beaten pretty regularly.

Of course, what would a women in prison film be without plenty of T&A? The film delivers on that level as well. There's a completely gratuitous shower scene that hits about half an hour in during which we see a good portion of the cast nude and wet. When not hanging out looking sexy in the shower, the bulk of the inmates spend their time wearing little more than prison rags, showing off their bodies in a pretty revealing manner.

In addition to the sleazy set pieces that pepper the film like good spice should, the movie also benefits from an excellent cast. Sid Haig (currently experiencing a resurgence in popularity thanks for Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects), a favorite of Jack Hill's, shows up as Harry, a man who makes his living selling small amounts of food and delivering letters for the female inmates in exchange for sexual favors. He's as good as you'd expect, going all out in his performance and making it quite a memorable turn and he gets more screen time in this one than he does in a lot of the supporting roles that he shows up for. Roberta Collins also shines as Alcott. She's sexy and plenty fun to look at but also manages to handle the tougher parts that are required of her character with a reasonable amount of believability.

The star of the show, however, is Pam Grier. From her soulful vocals on the opening theme song 'Long Time Woman' to her catfight scene in which she kicks a blonde Roberta Collins in the face before romping in the mud with her, she dominates each of the scenes she's in showing some intense screen presence and plenty of that sexy charm and tough attitude that made her a star. The scene in which she tries to seduce Sid Haig stands out as one of the more believable moments in the film, made so because of her hard hitting sensuality and dominant, no-nonsense attitude.

Hill's direction isn't flashy or all that stylized, but it does move the film along at a lightning fast pace. The cinematography is very 'matter of fact' in that it doesn't worry about flashy angles or exceptionally interesting camera movements – most of the action is caught by simply pointing the camera straight towards where it's all happening and letting it roll – but it works.

Oscar Award winning material this isn't, but the film definitely delivers everything you'd expect from a film from this genre. Sex, violence, and sleaze are all handed over in ample amounts making Big Doll House a completely enjoyable guilty pleasure.

Video:

Once again, Big Doll House is presented in a fullframe open matte transfer. There's way too much room up there at the top of the screen which does tend to throw off the compositions, but to the best of this reviewers knowledge, that's how it has always been presented on DVD and at least it doesn't appear to be cropped. In terms of image quality, this looks like the same transfer that was used on the earlier New Concorde release. A few spots look a little worse for wear and there's some grain and print damage evident pretty much throughout the duration of the film but it's never overpowering. Compression artifacts aren't really ever a problem but there is some aliasing and a bit of edge enhancement here if you want to look for it. Skin tones look all right, black levels could have been a tad stronger. Overall, this is an okay looking transfer but hardly a great one. It would have been nice to see this in anamorphic widescreen and to have had the image cleaned up more, but that unfortunately isn't what happened here…