Heavy-minded kinksters with a taste for ladies in chains, hard labor, and other penal sex delights might be a bit disappointed by the relatively tame quality of Jess Franco’s Women in Prison picture 99 Women. Sure, there’s a smattering of viciousness on hand, including a brief whipping scene, a gal hung from her wrists in the “punishment cell,” and some girl-on-girl-behind-bars action, though the latter is strictly soft velour, with lots of slow dissolves and tight close-ups of gasping mouths and questing fingers. But 99 Women still deserves a viewing by fetish fans and grindhouse hounds alike for several reasons. For one, it’s really the template for all the women’s prison movies that followed in its wake in the ‘70s – Roger Corman and Jack Hill’s Big Doll House, Caged Heat, and Hellhole, to name but a few, all sprang from 99 Women’s supercharged combination of jailhouse movie grit and the tireless and stylized cruelty of European S&M literature. The films that followed in its wake may have been more graphic (even Franco himself made harder and more outrageous WIP movies, including Sadomania, Ilsa the Wicked Warden, and the lunatic Barbed Wire Dolls), but 99 Women set the tone, and its considerable box office success sparked the international desire to see more of its type.

Second, it’s probably the best-looking of the entire WIP genre – Franco makes the most of his locations, which include scenes in Brazil and Spain -- and largely free of the weird visual tics that make many of Franco’s films such frustrating experiences (Jess can’t give up that roaming zoom, but he does make excellent use of lighting and editing on a limited budget, especially during an alarming gang-rape flashback). 99 Women also benefits from its strong cast, led by Mercedes McCambridge and Herbert Lom as the prison’s vicious bulldyke warden and governor, respectively; their performances, rich with menacing dialogue about the joys of discipline (“This is a place where we perform PUNISHMENT for crimes!”) suggest more severity and pain than any torture scene could accomplish. The prisoners, which include producer/screenwriter Harry Alan Towers’ girlfriend Maria Rohm, Euro sex starlet Rosalba Neri, Elisa Montes, and Luciana Paluzzi in a brief cameo, all accomplish the difficult task of looking foxy while suffering mightily.