Bamboo House of Dolls (1973)
Chinese Title: 女集中營
Translation: Women’s Concentration Camp
Starring:
Lo Lieh, Birte Tove, Wang Hsieh, Lee Hye-Sook, Terry Liu, Got Ping, Jin
Bong-Jin, Roska Rosen, Niki Wane, Na Ha-yeong,
Ko Sang-Mi
Director:
Kuei Chih-Hung
Action Director: Luk Chuen (credited as “Shikamura”)
Bamboo House of Dolls is my first “Women in Prison” (or WiP) film. I don’t know a whole
lot about the genre to be able to comment on it, so I’ll defer my introduction
to El Santo of “1000 Misspent Hours and Counting.” In his review of The Big
Doll House (1971), he writes[1]:
“Of all the
common breeds of exploitation movie, the New World-style women’s prison flick
most invites easy ideological pigeonholing as sexist trash, but it resists that
dismissal with the very same breath. For the fact is that the women’s prison
movie as codified by The Big Doll House calls upon the audience to
identify with the parties on both sides of the bars simultaneously. Yes, we are
cued to take pleasure in the inmates’ torments, to see them as objects for the
most sadistic whims of the male id. But at the same time— and in stark contrast
to the white slavery roughies— there’s no question but that the prisoners are
the heroes of these films, whose rebellion we await more longingly with each
new violation. Furthermore, the entire genre is pervaded by a
post-countercultural mistrust of authority. The treatment meted out to the
protagonists and their cellmates is almost always wildly disproportionate to
the crimes for which they were incarcerated— if in fact the prisoners are even
guilty of crimes at all. And the prison officials are invariably personally
villainous as well as representative of a corrupt regime. In the end, no other
genre strives so hard to make men root for women in revolt against an unjust
system, and while that may not exactly be feminist in and of itself, it isn’t
exactly regressive, either.”
As was the style of the time, Bamboo
House of Dolls is set some time during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 –
1945), which is essentially the name given to World War II as fought in China
against the Japanese occupiers. The movie opens with an injured man going into
a house and trying to send a message via telegraph. Before he can finish his
message, Japanese soldiers break in and mow the man down in a rain of gunfire.
His wife, Hong Yu-Lan (Korean actress Lee Hye-sook), is arrested in the confusion.
At the same time, the soldiers storm a Christian Red Cross hospital (staffed by
pretty Euro babes) looking for a downed American pilot. They start executing
patients until the pilot reveals himself, whom they murder on the spot. The
soldiers then arrest the nurses and (presumably) kill the rest of the
patients…because you know, Japanese atrocities and WW2.
So, let’s meet the five prisoners we’ll
spend the movie with. We already talked about Hong Yu-Lan. Besides being the
wife of a member of the Chinese resistance, her importance to the story is that
her husband revealed to her the location of stolen Japanese gold (which in turn
was stolen from Chinese banks) that the Resistance wants to buy arms with.
However, she took the butt of a rifle to the head before her arrest, so her
memory of its location is a bit fuzzy. There’s the head nurse from the
hospital, Jennifer (Birte Tove, of The Sexy Girls of Denmark), who is
more or less the main character of them all. She is joined by two other nurses:
Mary (Roska Rosen), the shy blonde, and Elizabeth (Niki Wane), the more
sex-starved of the group. There is also a blind girl named Hu Lizhu (Korean
actress Ko Sang-mi). The five are later joined by a female student named Wang
Xia (another Korean actress, Na Ha-yeong).
The first days in the camp are
characterized by all sorts of nasty business. One day, they are forced to watch
(and participate in) the deadly whipping of a fellow inmate (Dana, of Super Infra-Man and Image of Bruce Lee). There is also a food fight in the
mess hall that devolves into an all-out cat brawl. Our five heroines are also
raped by the higher ups. The entire film stops for this unpleasant sequence. Hu
Lizhu is poked with a katana and forced to walk on broken glass, after which
she’s raped on top of the glass. An officer tries to rape Hong Yu-Lang, but her
robotic, emotionless demeanor is a real turn-off for the guy, so he sleeps with
the sex-starved Elizabeth instead. Mary is the target of Security Officer Mako
(Terry Liu, of Super Infra-Man and The Dragon Lives Again), who
rapes her with a porcelain dildo until she comes to like it. The head of the
camp, Commander Inouye (Wang Hsieh, of Master of Kung Fu and Virgins
of the 7 Seas), sets his sights on Jennifer, although she resists his attempts
to violate her.
It takes about 50 minutes or so for the
actual plot to start. You see, the camp’s cook, Zhang (Jin Bong-jin, of The Heroic Ones and All Men are Brothers), is actually a member of the
Resistance. He informs Hong Yu-Lan and she plans with Elizabeth and the others
an escape. While they are escaping, Zhang attacks some guards, goes into the
engine room, and cuts off the camp’s power. That allows the girls (and Zhang)
to make it past the electric fence. They are eventually cut off by the Japanese,
who kill Zhang and take the girls back to camp…for more torture and
unpleasantness. But now Jennifer knows that there is a spy among them…and that
there’s another ally of theirs among the Japanese officers: Captain Cui (Lo
Lieh, of Five Fingers of Death and The Chinese Boxer).
It goes without saying that Bamboo
House of Dolls is a seriously sleazy film. The first half finds every
excuse possible to show us bare breasts, from gratuitous group showers to girls
getting their clothes ripped off during cat fights. Mary gets raped no less
than twice, but each time she grows to like the sex; later it is implied that
she is regularly sleeping with Mako and getting favors from her. And even in
the second half, when the plot starts moving, there are several scenes of the
women being tortured. In one of them, a wooden bar is placed across a sitting
Jennifer’s upper legs, while her feet are placed upon wooden blocks. Blocks are
added to that the height of her legs causes the bar to press down on her femur.
The last twenty minutes or so consist of
a series of action scenes as the girls must escape from the camp itself, make
their way through the wilderness, and then deal with the traitor once the gold
is found. There is also an extensive battle between the Chinese Resistance and
the Japanese soldiers, which is literally broadswords versus bayonets. That
sequence was choreographed by Luk Chuen, the Chinese name for Japanese actor
and martial artist Yasuyoshi Shikamura. He was one of the few Japanese imports
in Hong Kong cinema to become an action director in addition to an actor. There
is also some girl-fu at the end. As much as I like that sort of thing, it is
hardly cathartic given the treatment the girls have endured up to this point.
In the best tradition of Hong Kong cinema, anyone can die at any time in these
movies, and that goes doubly true for Bamboo House of Dolls. This
is definitely not a movie for the weak of heart.
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