The film presently isn't listed on the IMDb, while Mondo Macabro's English language version is missing all screen credits. The story involves two sisters, Shelia (Yenny Farida) and Dina (Nina Anwar), whose parents were murdered by drug lords wanting to turn their fortress-like estate into an illegal drug laboratory and all-around headquarters. The girls seek vengeance against their leader, Mr. Tiger (Dicky Zulkarnaen, whose wardrobe suggests Gian Maria Volonte in one of his Spaghetti Westerns), and form a bad-ass biker gang of about 15 scantily-clad (but mostly dumpy and curiously unattractive) women in leopard skin and brightly-colored silk hotpants. They also drive a Suzuki four-wheeler adorned with a skull & crossbones, a swastika, and a lighting bolt, so you know these girls mean business.

As the film opens, the girls raid one of Tiger's casinos, which does little more than piss off Tiger and stir disharmony within the girl gang. "Half a million big ones!" gloats Shelia, "Nothing can stop us now!" Later, a massive raid on Tiger's camp proves disastrous; the women are captured and thrown into Tiger's expansive dungeon. (One wonders what Shelia and Dina's parents did for a living. Besides the dungeon, the home is equipped with several guard towers, torture chambers, and a vast underground network complete with drug laboratory. All that's missing is a moat.)

Tiger makes the women his slaves and orders them to harvest coconuts. Meanwhile, Larry (Harry Capri), a medical student "dragged from his dormitory" at gunpoint develops a wild aphrodisiac, which Tiger and his men are naturally anxious to try out on the girls. Larry, Shelia, and Dina eventually escape, but how will they wreak their vengeance?

Back in the 1970s and early-1980s, this reviewer remembers seeing a number of feature length films made by teenagers and young adults shot in Super-8 Sound, a few even in 'scope. These ambitious but mostly awful films shamelessly imitated mainstream Hollywood films on 1/1000 the budget, including an especially outrageous, full-length rip-off of Jaws - filmed in Michigan. Nevertheless, these backyard movies were undeniably ambitious production-wise and were often charmingly naive. Virgins from Hell has a very similar feel, as it aims for big scale action on an obviously inadequate budget. (From the look of things, and taking into account the presumably much cheaper labor in Indonesia, I'd guess this was made for around $150,000.)

The two big set pieces, the raids on Tiger's fortress, are filmed like the climax to a James Bond movie. But where art directors like Ken Adam had almost unlimited resources to draw upon, the folks at Rapi Films resort to imitation linoleum, painted rocks, and cardboard. It's almost cute. Tiger's suite features what can only be described as bubble-gum colored shag carpeting - on the walls. The prop guns look like toys (and may be just that), though there's more ammunition fired in this film than perhaps all of World War II.

Like most films of its type, there is an emphasis on torture, rape, and gore, with Tiger's sadism toward several prisoners particularly lurid. All this would be deeply disturbing were it not so patently phony, even cartoonish.

The film is genuinely unseemly in one respect: several animals are clearly traumatized on-camera. One woman is tortured by being placed in a coconut sack with some sort of lemur, which is panting and appears crushed by the end of the scene. A rat is squashed on-camera, though this may be faked.

Animal cruelty aside, Virgins from Hell delivers exactly what it sets out to achieve, and audiences attracted to such films were probably satisfied. If films like Prehistoric Women/Slave Girls, Black Mama White Mama, and The Big Bird Cage, appeal to you, than you'll probably like this.

Video & Audio

Virgins from Hell is presented in its original CinemaScope aspect ratio and is 16:9 enhanced for widescreen TVs. Considering its source, the image is in remarkably good condition with minimal wear and damage, some of it possibly going back to its original theatrical release. The English mono soundtrack is weak, but again this seems inherent in the original English-dubbing. The original Indonesian track is not offered, nor are there any subtitle options.

Extra Features

Mondo has turned this into an event title, a two-disc set with lots of extras. Disc One includes a 16:9 trailer for Virgins from Hell, which adds that the girls are "more beautiful than the Angels from Heaven!" Also included is Women in Chains - An Overview of W.I.P. Movie, an decent essay by Pete Tombs.

Disc Two, Destination: Jakarta, features just under 70 minutes of Indonesian Exploitation Trailers. The trailers are 16:9 widescreen but frequently distorted (unsqueezed, over-squeezed) and many have a lot of digital break-up. For the record the trailers are: The Snake Woman, The Devil's Sword, The Warrior, The Warrior and Ninja, The Warrior Against the Blind Swordsman, The Blind Warrior, Virgins from Hell, Escape from Hell Hole, Blazing Battle, Hell Raiders, Tiger Commands, Freedom Force, Daredevil Commandos, The Terrorists, Final Score, Violent Killer, Bloody Vengeance, Revenge of Ninja, Primitives, Slave of Satan, and Mystics in Bali.

Finally, the disc includes the same 24-minute documentary about Indonesian sleaze that was also featured on Mondo Macabro's Lady Terminator

Parting Thoughts

Painted with the broadest of strokes, Virgins from Hell is a wild pastiche of action-exploitation cliches so over-the-top that it becomes entertaining, while Mondo Macabro's presentation and useful extras add to the fun.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.