NEW WORLD PICTURES MONTH: The Big Bust-Out (1972)

Io Monaca… per tre Carogne e Sette Peccatrici (The Crucified Girls of San Ramon) was an Italian women in prison movie directed by Ernst Ritter von Theumer (Jungle WarriorsIsland of the Doomed), who co-wrote it with Sergio Garrone (SS Experiment CampThe Hand That Feeds the DeadDjango the Bastard).

Roger Corman brought it to the U.S., cut out twenty minutes and renamed it The Big Bust-Out.

A bunch of female prisoners get a work release in a convent and easily overpower their guards and go on the run. To make sure that God stays with them, Sister Maria (Monica Teuber) follows along. This entails them all being sold into white slavery — Gordon Mitchell being the villainous El Kadir who buys them and William Berger being the one who sells them — and saved by Jeff (Tony Kendall), a boat captain.

But El Kadir and his men won’t give up, chasing the women for the entire film. One of his men, a small man with a whip, lashes Vonetta McGee from The Great Silence at one point. It’s certainly wild, but at best you can say it’s all over the place. The North Africa — I believe — shooting locations look great and this movie has the kind of cast and material that makes me think Jess Franco should have been involved.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.