646f9e108c A nurse in a Japanese women's POW camp during World War II masterminds an escapee.
During World War II a Red Cross hospital in China is ransacked by the Japanese army and the female nurses are sent to a concentration camp. While there they are beaten, raped and tortured by the guards. However the women have found someone to help them escape and as soon as they get the chance a small group of them make a break for it. Unfortunately, things don't go exactly as planned because a traitor within the group has forewarned the beautiful but sadistic female officer in charge of security named "Mako" (Terry Liu). And now their mistreatment really begins. Anyway, rather than reveal any more of the story and risk ruining the film for those who haven't seen it I will just say that this turned out to be a fairly good Women-in-Prison movie. I personally liked the luscious blonde prisoner named "Jennifer" (Birte Tove) and the aforementioned Terry Liu although there were quite a few other pretty ladies in this movie as well. Be that as it may I recommend this film to those who enjoy this particular genre and I rate it as slightly above average.
BAMBOO HOUSE OF DOLLS is the Shaw Brothers response to the wave of women-in-prison films that were doing the international rounds in the early 1970s, mainly spearheaded by Roger Corman's exploitation movies shot in the Philippines. The result is this movie, one which is superficially watchable and contains all of the right ingredients, although one that's also oddly muted in places.<br/><br/>The main problem I had with this film is that it does feel like an imitation rather than a work of art. Director Kuei Chih-Hung was well known for creating some of the stronger movies to be released by Shaw but he didn't hit his stride until the early 1980s with his Hong Kong horrors like HEX. Here, he goes through the motions more than anything else.<br/><br/>The film opens with a bunch of women, some of them blonde Westerners, being captured by typically sadistic Japanese troops and thrown in prison. There's a full hour of the usual WIP clichés, including a sadistic lesbian guard, plenty of padded sex scenes, torture, and nudity from pretty much every woman in the cast. Later, an escape attempt moves this film into action-adventure territory with the hunt for some stolen gold, and it all ends via stock action which isn't too exciting. The most interesting cast member is Lo Lieh, cast against type as one of the good guys for a change; the rest isn't really much to get too excited about.