preppy-3 Caught this years ago at a Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. They showed it along with "Scum" which dealt with the horrors of teenage male prisoners in England. This deals with women in prison.The film focuses on two women who escape--one (Annetta) wants to visit her baby daughter who is being raised in a convent. The other (Carol) wants to be recaptured and sent to a prison where her girlfriend is. They're both recaptured but Annetta wrongly assumes that Carol ratted on her. Then they're both sent to the same prison and Annetta seeks revenge. It all leads to a depressing ending.Grim and brutal. There's no humor and no letup in the tension. All the actresses are (pretty obviously) too old to be playing 20 year olds but their acting is so good I was able to ignore it. Worth catching. Trying seeing it with "Scum" which is even more disturbing.

bletcherstonerson I saw this expecting the typical WIP exploitation. Unfortunately it is a story told with a bleak reality and stark setting. I also hate to say this, but the girl whose child is in a convent , is so obnoxious that all we wish for is to have ill fall upon her. Yes she is also included in the worst slow motion sequence ever filmed. It looks like the girls were moving slow while filming at normal speed to get the action right then it was going to be sped up to look a vicious beating in real time. Someone forgot yo speed up the sequence and it looks like my kids playing super heroes in the back yard moving in super slo-mo. Actually my kids have better " mad skills". Yet I digress, on with the positive... This is a pretty good movie with solid performances with a few interesting story lines. The most exploitive part is that all the girls are attractive and obviously haggled up for their roles. I gave this a 7 because it was earnest and interesting...it is not " Prison a go go, or reform school girls, but if you want to watch women's OZ, then this is your flick.

rosscinema This is a film from the much respected Mai Zetterling and to be honest its clearly not one of her better efforts. We have all seen girls in prison/reform school type of films before and while the gritty atmosphere of the film is effective its still very familiar and bleak. I would have appreciated more of an effort to understand these girls instead of just having the characters put in situations and then watching them react. We know very little or nothing at all about most of these girls. I was interested in the two characters Carol and Eddie and I wish they had a script with a little more sharper vision to it. There is one scene that shows two girls fighting and it was in slow motion. Why is that one and only scene in slow motion? No reason for it. It looked very badly staged. English viewers will recognize a lot of the actress's in the film while Americans will probably only recognize Robbie Coltrane in an early effort. Film just didn't have an original angle in the way it was presented. To bad, some really talented people were involved in this production.

tilapia Outstanding English-language effort by the great Swedish actor/director Mai Zetterling (anyone who have seen her brilliant Night Games will agree she kicks Bergman's sorry ass!).Although the video box art tried to sell it off as a cheap Women-In-Prison-exploitation flick, it is really serious stuff. As other commentators have pointed out the film share a lot of similarity with Alan Clarke's grim masterpiece Scum, even sharing the same screenwriter. The main difference is that Scrubbers takes place in an all-women juvenile prison, making it both a great complement to Clarke's film and an interesting study of the differences of the sexes in the patriarchal society. Didn't sound that interesting, did it? Well, it really is when you think about it! For instance, how do the girls behavior to one another differ from the boys? How do girls backgrounds, views of themselves and reason for inprisonment differ? What issues do the girls from Scrubbers lack, that the boys from Scum has to deal with, and vice versa. It's really interesting. The film is well-acted, well-scripted, thought-provoking and unpleasant. A must-see if you like your movies hard and unembellished. 8/10NOTE FOR NON-ENGLISH VIEWERS: I saw a non-subtitled copy Scrubbers, and although this usually is no problem for me, in this case I had some trouble understanding parts of the dialouge. My American-born girlfriend had the same problem. Unless you've majored in ugly working-class English, local swearwords or prison-jive I would advise to see a subtitled version.