Syd! Reviews

Escape from Women's Prison (1978)

Top Notch Exploitation Flick

[10/10 · 25 December 2001]

Wow! What a great movie! Why has nobody heard of this one? It was released as a double bill tape with SWEET SUGAR, but the tape doesn't contain any credits for the film besides the title. It does seem to be an Italian release, but I'm not sure whether it was made in 1974, though: there's a reference in the film to one of the characters being in prison since 1975. Maybe it was dubbed into English after 1975. Who knows?

This is one taut, zippy (70 minutes) and surprisingly political thriller, with enough sex, nudity, lesbianism, rape, violence and murder to please any exploitation fan. The movie begins with a gang of sex starved Communist revolutionaries on the run from a prison break. They hijack a bus load of nubile tennis players and hold them hostage at a mansion owned by the bourgeois capitalist judge who put the girls away in the first place. Amazing stuff. Rent it now!

All My Life (1966)

Has nobody seen this movie?

[10/10 · 11 August 1999]

After accidently stumbling across the entry for Bruce Baillie's marvellous ALL MY LIFE, I was amazed to see that it had yet to receive even five votes. Well, not amazed exactly -- it is after all a three minute long avant-garde movie set to the Ella Fitzgerald song ALL MY LIFE -- but a little disappointed nonetheless. For those of you who haven't read the plot summary (so to speak), ALL MY LIFE is a movie about a fence. A three minute pan left of a fence. To spice things up, there are even a few rose bushes and a final tilt up to the sky as the song comes to an end.

But why is this movie so good? I think one reason is perhaps the calmness that comes from its minimalism. It was made in the mid-sixties at a time when the American avant-garde movement was really booming: Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, et al. That was also a boom period for the drug scene (just listen to The Beatles!), and you can see a definite shift toward psychedelia and sensory overload. Even Warhol, for all his banality, was still in yer face. ALL MY LIFE, with its pared down mise-en-scene and music track that recalls an earlier era, seems to play in the other direction. An analogy might be the Talking Heads movie STOP MAKING SENSE, which adopted a very classical style in favour of the rock razzledazzle and MTV aesthetic that one associates with the mid-1980s.

But ALL MY LIFE is deceptively simple and unassuming. There isn't room to do it justice here, but the implications of the pan left or the tilt to the sky seem quite profound -- even transcendental, as we observe the seemly banal and look up towards the heavens. It also quite simply reminds you that there's more to cinema than hyperfast cutting (stand up Mr Michael Bay) or supposedly breathtaking special effects (Mr Lucas). And, hey, if Bruce Baillie can do it with a fence, why can't you?!