The story was banged out in a flash of frustration by British born producer Harry Alan Towers. In an interview with Allan Bryce for Shock Xpress (One Step Away from the County Line), Towers talks of how he'd hired Franco to shoot a sequel to The Million Eyes of Su-Muru (1967) and had him go down to Brazil, with the idea that as things came to a wrap Franco could top it all off with footage of the yearly carnival in Rio. "Now, Jess," Towers says "with all his zooming about, always finished very quickly - usually in time to have lunch. Anyway, on this occasion he actually finished filming a whole week before the carnival, so all the cast and crew were just sitting around. I couldn't stand to see this, so, literally over the weekend, I wrote a script called 99 Women, a sexy women's prison picture. There were actually only three women in it, but we hoped that people wouldn't notice!"
The three actresses to star as the women destined to make a break from the prison to try their luck in the jungle are Maria Rohm (Towers' wife), Luciana Paluzzi, and Rosalba Neri, and it was this footage, shot in six-days and constituting about a third of the film, that allowed Towers to get more money and finish the film in Spain with three more weeks of shooting that added Maria Schell as a sympathetic lead. In the role of a sadistic warden who takes extra zeal in punishing the female wards of her island prison is Mercedes McCambridge (1916-2004), who won an Oscar® for her supporting role in All the Kings Men (1959) and provided the demonic voice for the child in The Exorcist (1973). The use of a rousing theme song and some unusually stylized sexual encounters recall the work of Russ Meyer. (Franco himself refers to his film as showing "Eroticism not of the first degree but of the second.") But the sensibility that traipses through the jungle, from showing sublime lensing that captures a leaf twirling by a cobweb and lit by flashing rays from the sun, to a far from sublime and vulgar attack on a real snake that shows it being repeatedly stabbed, well, this mix of the high and low is pure Franco.
Tim Lucas, publisher of Video Watchdog, in an excerpt from his essay Horrotica: The Sex Scream of Jess Franco observes that "Franco is an acquired taste and certainly not for anyone. At his worst, he's numbingly dull. At his best, he's the Henry Jaglom of Horror - casting himself and his actor friends in anguished, blood-and-semen-scarred scenarios that tell you more about his inner life than you really want to know. Franco's abrupt production methods and minimal budgets, which give his work an inevitable "free association" tinge, coupled with his unnerving obsession with sadistic images, have not exactly endeared him to the American marketplace." 99 Women would be one of the exceptions to this since "that picture," according to producer Harry Alan Towers, "which cost less than a quarter million dollars, went into distribution in the United States and became the biggest grossing picture in America for three weeks." It also spawned a slew of imitators that helped Roger Corman's company, New World Pictures, get up and running.
Blue Underground's release of 99 Women presents the film in its 1.66:1 ratio and includes a 19 min interview with the director titled Jess' Women, wherein Franco, still smoking, reveals that "even Fritz Lang told me: 'I hate erotic films, but yours I like a lot.' He also talks of the many different versions that were released, including some by porn merchants that inserted their own hardcore scenes. Deleted and alternate scenes include one extended scene sourced from a Greek videotape. Toppings things off are a theatrical trailer, poster & still gallery, and a Jess Franco bio.
For more information about 99 Women, visit Blue Undergound. To order 99 Women, go to TCM Shopping.
by Pablo Kjolseth
