Diario segreto da un carcere femminile, or as it’s called in the UK, Love in a Woman’s Prison, is the very first Italian women-in-prison film and marks the directing debut of Rino Di Silvestro, who also wrote it. The censored version is Love and Death in a Women’s Prison and it was also called Secret Diary of a Women’s Prison, Hell Prison on UK home video and Hwt Seksueel Lelel in de Vrouwen Gevangenissen in Belgium, which means Sexual Spooning In a Women’s Prison.
An unsuccessful Interpol drug bust goes sideways when a gangster named Tonino snipes a heroin courier and steals twenty kilos of the product. Tonino and his girlfriend, Daniela Vinci (Jenny Tamburi, Scandalous Emanuelle, Frankenstein – Italian Style), attempt to smuggle the stash into Switzerland, but Tonino dies in a fiery car crash and the drugs seemingly vanish.
With no physical evidence and the real criminal dead, Interpol frames the entirely innocent Daniela, locking her up to extract information about Tonino’s boss, Carmillo Musumeci. Unbeknownst to Daniela, Musumeci’s daughter Hilda (Anita Strindberg) is secretly an Interpol agent who gets herself locked inside the prison undercover to crack the case Shock Corridor-style.
Meanwhile, a rival mafia syndicate hunts down Don Carmillo to recover their missing merchandise or money. When Carmillo tries to escape his captors, he falls to his death through a rotted catwalk. Back inside the concrete walls, the prison is thoroughly compromised: the warden, the corrupt head matron Gerda (Olga Bisera) and Daniela’s own lawyer (Umberto Raho) are all tangled in a three-way chess game alongside the mob and Interpol. Ultimately, Hilda uncovers the truth of the missing drugs, but the victory is short-lived as Daniela is poisoned and Hilda and her superiors are eliminated by the syndicate, leaving organized crime entirely triumphant.
The United States home video release arrived in 1981, with the English title Women in Cell Block 7 heavily suspected to be a tactical financial play to ride the coattails of similar European women-in-prison features, such as the work of Jess Franco. This is less a WIP movie and more one that splits its running time right down the middle, functioning equally as an Italian mafia crime drama featuring shootouts and car chases, and a traditional exploitation movie.
Later Di Silvestro films work better because they lean in harder on the sleaze, such as Deported Women of the SS Special Section and Werewolf Woman. That said, Paola Senatore is in this.
