If exploitation cinema is a swamp — murky, seedy, buzzing with bad decisions — then 99 Women is the alligator that shows up halfway through, belches, and dies on camera. This 1969 exercise in estrogen-fueled misery was Jess Franco’s entry into the lucrative Women-in-Prison subgenre. And by “entry,” I mean he showed up late, spilled wine on the script, and filmed it through a fog of cigarettes, sweat, and apathy.
99 Women is what happens when someone dares you to make a prison film with no plot, no budget, and just enough nudity to keep the reels from catching fire. The title promises a teeming pit of depraved inmates — 99 women clawing for survival in some sweaty, fascist hellhole. But don’t get too excited. You never meet more than six of them, and half of those are named things like “Blonde Victim #2.”
Set in an unnamed island prison — which, judging by the palm trees and papier-mâché walls, might just be a resort Jess Franco got kicked out of — the film follows Marie (Maria Rohm), a fresh-faced political prisoner who arrives at the institution with all the wide-eyed innocence of a tourist who booked the wrong Sandals getaway. She’s quickly introduced to her new life: hard labor, sadistic guards, and a prison warden who makes Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS look like Mary Poppins.
The warden is played by Mercedes McCambridge, the Oscar-winner who apparently lost a bet and found herself yelling at half-naked women while holding a whip. She delivers every line like she’s gargling gravel and hatred. She snarls. She berates. She sweats. A lot. Honestly, she’s the only one in the movie giving a performance, and it’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the teeth.
The plot — and I use that word the way one uses “architecture” to describe a collapsing shack — involves Marie trying to survive the prison, make allies, and maybe, just maybe, escape. Except the movie isn’t interested in escape. It’s interested in slow pans of topless women in filthy cells, pointless flings between inmates and guards, and an occasional monologue about “freedom” that feels like it was lifted from a high school production of Les Misérables.
Let’s talk tone. Franco seems unsure whether he’s making a political allegory, a softcore fantasy, or a documentary on sad boobs. One scene will feature a brutal beating. The next, two inmates are making out in the shower while a bongo drum solo plays in the background. It’s like watching a porno try to win a Nobel Prize in literature. Spoiler: it doesn’t.
And then there’s the cinematography — or rather, the camera stumbling through the jungle like it’s hungover. Scenes are overlit or underlit. Sometimes both, somehow. Franco zooms in and out like he’s trying to find his own artistic vision and keeps failing. There are so many shaky close-ups of sweaty cleavage you’d think the cameraman was being electrocuted during filming.
The dialogue sounds like it was translated from French to English by a guy who only spoke German. Gems include, “I was born to be free… but now I’m shackled in the bowels of this cruel institution,” and “You can’t tame a wild bird with chains.” That last one is said during a forced-feeding scene. Poetry, apparently, is alive and unwell.
The music deserves its own prison sentence. A psych-jazz-funk-fusion mess that sounds like an organ grinder got into a fight with a theremin and lost. Sometimes the score is moody. Sometimes it’s manic. Often, it’s louder than the actors. At one point, it literally drowns out a crucial line of dialogue. Not that it matters. That line was probably something like, “We must escape… through the sewer pipe of destiny!”
The women, of course, are all impossibly attractive, even in prison rags and shackles. Their makeup never smudges. Their hair always falls just right. When they’re not being beaten or leered at by guards, they’re bathing together in the world’s cleanest jungle waterfall. Every now and then, a woman gets whipped — not for narrative reasons, but to remind you this movie was made for men who buy wine coolers and lie about reading Camus.
But what really makes 99 Women such a chore is how completely uninterested it is in its own premise. There’s no grit, no tension, no character arc. Just an endless loop of nudity, crying, and the occasional philosophical monologue from someone who looks like they were paid in sandwiches. It’s a film that constantly hints at meaning but never delivers — a striptease of ideas that stops at the first button.
By the time the “climax” arrives — a rushed escape sequence involving a machete, a speedboat, and more bad lighting — you’ve already emotionally checked out. The film doesn’t build to anything. It just sort of flops to a stop, like a wet sock falling off a clothesline. Characters die, others live, no one learns a damn thing, and the audience is left with nothing but a cold, oily feeling of cinematic regret.
And sure, you could argue that 99 Women paved the way for future WIP (Women In Prison) films, that it established tropes and broke taboos. But that’s like saying the guy who invented chewing tobacco helped create modern dentistry. Just because you did it first doesn’t mean you did it well.
In the end, 99 Women is a Jess Franco movie for people who think Franco was “too focused” in his later years. It’s exploitative without being fun, political without being smart, erotic without being sexy, and dramatic without ever once making you care. It’s a stew of clichés, boobs, bad lighting, and misplaced ambition.
Final Verdict: 1.5 out of 5 sweat-soaked shackles
A tedious, confused, and overhyped mess. Like prison itself, 99 Women promises danger and excitement — but all you get is fluorescent lighting and a lot of crying. Watch only if your remote is broken and your standards are six feet under.
