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Jailhouse Wardress
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - MVD Visual Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (19th December 2023). |
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The Film
 In the aftermath of World War II, a Jewish organization is tracking down SS officers who fled before Germany surrendered. Their latest quarry is currently the governor (Women Behind Bars' Roger Darton) of a South American women's prison who is willing to overlook the sadistic measures of the wardress (Shining Sex's Monica Swinn) and prison doctor Manera (Lady Frankenstein's Paul Muller) to maintain order through torture; that is, until a note is smuggled to him detailing the poor treatment of prisoners. The wardress attempts to root out and punish the snitch, and prostitute Lola (The Amorous Sisters' Nadine Pascal) begins to feel guilty when the more likely suspect Bertha (Doriana Gray's Martine Stedil) is interrogated and beaten while all she and murderess cellmate Teresa (Lorna the Exorcist's Pamela Stanford) have to do to distract studly guard Nestor (Je brűle de partout's Didier Aubriot) is make out with each other. Lola makes a mistake in confessing to Teresa who is hoping to keep the governor's bed warm despite the impotent man's fetishes, and it only takes one encounter with the governor and Nestor for her to plot her escape; however, she is not the only one plotting a jail break, and the guards have order to shoot to kill but only after they have had their fun. Featuring very little original footage directed by Alain Deruelle – known for his adult features as "Alain Thierry" and his softcore features as "Allan W. Steeve" as he signed this film and his dire Eurociné cannibal film Cannibal Terror – Jailhouse Wardress is otherwise a mishmash of footage from at least two other films of its ilk that are better in retrospect and only just seems to be held together in the editing. The film opens with footage from Eurociné's earlier Nazisploitation film Elsa Fraulein S.S as Darton informs an officer (Down Town's Ronald Weiss) that he is going forward with his plan to send prostitutes to the front in order to identify traitors among their ranks, but that he has chosen to put officer Elsa Ackerman in charge of the operation which leads not to the introduction of that character but to few seconds of footage from the cabaret act opening of Eurociné's Special Train for Hitler to introduce his mistress while cutting around the credits suggesting that Deruelle did not have access to the negative materials. After the scene with the Jewish operatives – among them the film's cinematographer Raymond Heil (Orloff and the Invisible Man) – identifying their targets in the officer and his mistress, the mistress is dropped and the bulk of the new footage is intercut with partially-redubbed scenes from Jess Franco's Swiss women-in-prison for producer Erwin C. Dietrich titled Barbed Wire Dolls (which Dietrich virtually a few years later as Caged Women) still prominently featuring scenes with Swinn and Muller along with Beni Cardoso (The Girl from Rio) and Peggy Markoff (Ilsa, the Wicked Warden) as lesbian cellmates. That film's other main character Maria (Female Vampire's Lina Romay) is relegated to the background for most of the film, and her dreams of sexual abuse by her father (played by director Franco himself) have been redubbed to make him her uncle (amusingly, while he is called "Uncle Tony" on the English dub, he is christened "Uncle Jess" in French). One of Nestor's guard colleagues is played by Romay's ex Ramon Ardid (Tender and Perverse Emanuelle) turns up in cutaways from the Franco film, but Barbed Wire Dolls' original Nestor actor Eric Falk (Rolls Royce Baby) only turns up in his final scene. Lola's and Maria's footage from the Deruelle shoot also includes flashbacks depicting how they wound up behind bars, with Lola arrested with a john and Teresa murdering her cheating husband while the Nazi hunter part of the plot is almost forgotten until the final scenes in which the production could not spring for a rifle crosshairs optical and improvised something quite ridiculous on location. A thorough mess that almost seems to hold its viewers in contempt, Jailhouse Wardress is less interesting as a women-in-prison film than as one of Eurociné's more shameless concoctions to keep their properties in circulation. 
Video
Unreleased theatrically or on video in the United States – it might have been released in some Canadian territories theatrically since Eurociné had a lucrative arrangement with Cinépix but it definitely turned up there on French-language VHS – Jailhouse Wardress probably always looked a little ragged given the multiple sources but MVD Visual's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.41:1 pillarboxed fullscreen Blu-ray looks horrendous. Sourced from an aged standard definition video master, the image can be seen as it reframes itself to 1.66:1 for the opening credits while the new footage and the French films were presumably shot open-matte to be matted to 1.66:1. The scenes from Barbed Wire Dolls, on the other hand, are cropped on the sides compared to Dietrich's 1.85:1 standard definition and high definition remasterings of that film. There is little fine detail while the new footage looks only slightly better than the footage culled from the other films. We have no idea how the fullscreen German DVD of the anamorphic Dutch DVD looks (although presumably it is also an upscale if licensed from Eurociné), but MVD's edition however poor will prove the most widely accessible for the curious (or the masochistic). 
Audio
A small consolation for the video quality is that MVD has not only included both English and French dubs in uncompressed LPCM 2.0 mono – they have their own age-related and digitization defects – but also an English SDH subtitle option that turns out not to transcribe the English track but actually translate the French track, revealing differences between the English and French dialogue (including the aforementioned "Uncle Jess" lines).
Extras
The only extras are a video trailer (0:51) created by MVD and trailers for other Eurciné titles including another patchwork film Convoy of Women, Nathalie: Escape from Hell, Golden Temple Amazons, and Hudson River Massacre. 
Overall
A thorough mess that almost seems to hold its viewers in contempt, Jailhouse Wardress is less interesting as a women-in-prison film than as one of Eurociné's more shameless concoctions to keep their properties in circulation.
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