The Big Doll House (1971) is a shocking, semi-documentary, historically accurate look at the prison system of the Philippines.
It has been studied by corrections professionals worldwide.
This is the kind of thing you get on Turner Classic Movies’ late Friday night/early Saturday morning TCM Underground.
In other words, some real tasty drive-in theater trash.
Don’t you love it?
The Big Doll House wastes no time getting down to the dirty business of penal systems. In the first few minutes, viewer and prisoner alike are assaulted by an invasive strip search. There can be no contraband.
Did you know that most of the prisoners in the Philippines are hot-looking, American model types? Their work outfits are miniskirts. In the cell they wear micro-minis. It is that hot in the cellblocks.
Not to be outdone, the Filipina guards also wear attractive miniskirts.
This prison system also employs classy American women as their wardens. The one shown here is prim and proper. Accordingly, she also wears a discreet mini-dress accented with matching high heels.
International conventions prohibiting the use of torture are blithely ignored in this prison. Torture methods include a hydraulic snake dangling machine and an electric shock machine that looks like the rejected love child of a radio station control board and the Enterprise bridge. In Spock like fashion, the head guard operating these diabolical devices has no real feelings. Judging from her accent, she is of Eastern European extraction and wears a nicely tailored and form-fitting miniskirt uniform replete with sidearm and holster. Slim and cosmopolitan, though somewhat severe, in fact, icy, she looks like she just stepped out of Vogue. The Bulgarian edition.
In the category of “Now we know where they get their ideas,” there is a brief, but detailed scene of waterboarding. Keep in mind this film is from 1971. There are also hints of Papillon, Apocalypse Now, and pretty much anything Quentin Tarantino has ever touched. This is the Devil’s Island for hot girls and you will also see an early iteration of Chef from Apocalypse Now.
Anything that is exploitative and/or degrading is borrowed from and amplified, often with a humorous twist. Something to break that dreary prison house monotony.
Well, you say, it doesn’t have mud wrestling.* Au contraire, mon petit chou.
But that’s nothing. Any sick thought you can conjure-up is likely to find it’s voice in a suitably clever way in this ground-breaking film.
The action ending is to die for, literally, and a well deserved hats-off to the documentary filmmakers who used their war time experience to great advantage here. The danger shots captured on film were won at the risk of their very lives. Wild shooting ensues. Two-fisted babes with a machine gun in each hand deal deserving death. Magazines are emptied with barrels waving wildly. These dames can almost handle a machine gun. Their bullets find their marks. Barrels pointed everywhere bedsides the target are a tribute to the ammunition employed, especially the radical, curving-trajectory bullet developed in Manila.
Despite all odds, this is a good movie that picks-up steam as it goes along. How do I know The Big Doll House is a documentary?
Because it is so darn real.
*In a stunning rebuke for questionable Americana, the editors of this esteemed publication have discovered that nowhere in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is any version of the words “mud wrestling” found. Thus, a ray of dappled sunshine falls through the leaves of 2020 and it appears that the confines of language have contained some of the sleaze that otherwise oozes from everywhere else.