House of Cruel Dolls (1974)

House of Cruel Dolls is a very sleazy but engagingly weird slice of European sexploitation cinema.

M. Gaston arrives at the infamous whorehouse the House of Lost Dolls, which seems to be located in some unnamed exotic country. As usual Gaston chooses his favourite prostitute, Yvette (Magda Mundari). He’s a somewhat romantic middle-aged man and he’s fallen in love with Yvette. She’s fallen for him as well, since he always treats her well. He asks her the obvious question, what such a nice girl is doing in such a terrible place. She informs him that she was kidnapped by white slavers. All the girls working at the House of Lost Dolls are prisoners.

Gaston is outraged and decides that he is going to rescue the poor girl.

The story of how Yvette came to the infamous brothel is told in flashback. She was innocently hitch-hiking. She was kidnapped, raped, drugged, raped again and transported somewhere on a ship. She was then raped again and taken to the House of Lost Dolls.

Gaston and Yvette go to the police. The police are sympathetic but they need evidence. That’s where secret agent Sigma (Jack Taylor) enters the picture. And the movie suddenly switches from an exploitation sleazefest to an action thriller.

If it sounds like a movie with a split personality that’s apparently because many of the action scenes were lifted from a 1967 spy thriller starring Jack Taylor. The result should be a disjointed mess but really it just adds to the fun. And the 1967 footage is matched in pretty well with the later 1974 footage. Well, let’s put it this way - I’ve never it done much more badly than this.

Secret agent Sigma leaves a trail of mayhem behind him. What he really needs is evidence from one of the girls and he thinks he may be able to get it, if the goons working for the madam of the brothel don’t get to her first.

Meanwhile Yvette tries to play amateur detective and gets into predictable trouble (and yes, she gets raped again).

This is very low-budget stuff and obviously there was no money for really elaborate action se-pieces The movie compensates for that by having lots and lots of fight scenes. And the fight scenes are done reasonably well. Yvette even gets a couple of fright scenes, and even wins one of her fights. Both Sigma and Yvette get captured by the bad guys and escape and get captured again. It’s a bit like a 1940s movie serial.

The movie doesn’t look quite as cheap or shoddy as you might fear. It’s competently made, if lacking in any real inspiration. Pierre Chevalier was not the world’s greatest director. You’d probably notice that there aren’t too many sets, that is you’d notice if you weren’t distracted by the endless fight scenes and the wall-to-wall naked women. But that’s what exploitation movie-making is all about.

There’s an enormous amount of female frontal nudity. It’s all strictly softcore. What makes the rape scenes shocking is not their explicitness (they’re not explicit at all) but their casualness and relentlessness. The moment the madam leaves them alone with the girls for five minutes the goons just start raping them. And the girls don’t struggle much because they realise there’s no point. They just accept that they’re going to be raped over and over again. It’s the resigned despair of the girls that makes those scenes harrowing, and the fact that the goons rape the girls with no more thought or passion than they’d put into pouring themselves a beer.

The acting is less than outstanding. I know Jack Taylor is a bit of a cult movie icon due to his appearance in several Jess Franco films but as an actor it has to be said that acting was not his forte. Magda Mundari can’t really act either (presumably she was cast because she was gorgeous and willing to take her clothes off) but she does have a high likeability factor. We want this girl to get out of the jam she’s in. The chief villain is the madam of the brothel - she’s beautiful, glamorous and coldly evil, a fine villainess.

Full Moon’s DVD release (there’s a Blu-Ray as well) offers a good anamorphic transfer with no extras. It offers only the English dubbed version. The dubbing is pretty horrendous but it does add an extra layer of outrageousness. The print is uncut.

I’m not going to try to persuade you that House of Cruel Dolls is a neglected cinematic masterpiece. It’s cheap, trashy and sleazy. It’s not quite as sleazy as some of the more extreme European women-in-prison movies of that era but it’s still plenty sleazy. But if you’re in the mood for cheap, trashy and sleazy it delivers the goods.