Such a frustrating disappointment

It is a performances centric movie

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

With 'Sadomania', director Jess Franco has deftly created yet another cinematic masterpiece, while at the same time he completely blows the lid off of the shadowy underworld of topless female slave camps. (Not surprisingly, this gem was completely ignored by the snooty snobs on the Oscar committee!) The film also exposes just how easy it is to assemble a bevy of attractive young 'actresses' in the middle of nowhere and convince them to degrade themselves for an entire film. A young newlywed couple is honeymooning along a desolate, rocky, section of the Spanish coastline, (why?!), when they are suddenly hijacked and taken prisoner by the sadistic warden of a local slave camp and her, topless, female armed guards. The husband is quickly released and ordered to never return, (oh, O.K.!), while his hot wife remains captive. She is placed with the other slaves and forced to crack rocks along the coast, beneath the blazing sun, and under the watchful eyes of the guards. Their uniforms consist of 'Daisy Duke' short shorts and sneakers. In fact, there is not a bra in sight for the entire film. These poor wretches aren't even provided with some basic sunscreen! Enter the 'Governor', a man who lacks any morals, nor, apparently, any blood flow to his penis. He and his warden like to kill prisoners for sport. One blond hottie soon gets in a fight with one of the guards, and the warden orders that they fight to the death to settle their differences. The fight scene which follows is of such complexity that it clearly took seconds to choreograph. Blondie finally dispatches her adversary, but her skill, and body, have caught the attention of the Governor. He has her brought to his home, where he devises a perverted plan which will finally allow him to successfully pork his smokin' hot wife. Enter 'Panzer' the Wonder Pooch, (I just made that name up). Panzer is a large German Shepard with a fondness for hot, blond, slave chicks. As the Governor and his wife watch, Panzer is set loose upon the naked and shackled slave chick. He dives into humping slave girl with gusto. (Surprisingly, Panzer chooses the missionary position over doggy style!) This sick display of bestiality is enough to finally give the Governor a stiffy, and he is able to successfully pork his wife to completion. (Panzer later won the award for 'Best Dog on Blond Chick Sex Scene' at the Cannes de Alpo awards.) Next, the Governor's wife decides to sell slave girl to another slaver, and she drives her to a local wharf to make the deal. Following the sale, the evil slaver locks slave girl in the cargo hold of his boat and sets sail for.....who knows? As expected, his own horniness soon gets the better of him, and he begins raping slave girl. She spots his gun in his belt and sees an opportunity for escape. She uses her feminine charm to convince the slaver to unshackle her, and when he does she quickly snatches the pistol from his belt. Now with the upper hand, she displays a moment of sheer stupidity. She holds the gun a mere few inches from his face and upraised hands and orders him not to move. Of course, he immediately swats the gun from her grasp, and then proceeds to continue dry humping her into submission. The viewer is treated to the sight of his hairy ass rising and falling between her thighs. At this point, my curiosity has been more than satisfied, and I decide to extricate myself from this sucking vortex of suckiness. Sorry, if you want to know how it all ends you'll have to waste an hour and a half of your own life. 5 stars given only for the wealth of gratuitous topless and full frontal nudity. Show less

Generally speaking, I'm a an admirer of Jess Franco's film-making but, for some of this movies, I really have difficulties understanding the motivation behind them or even their reason of existence. Like this sick puppy, for example. "Sadomania" has absolutely no cinematic value, it's poorly made without any sort of plot and featuring some of the most ill-natured sleaze footage ever captured on film. This is another filthy women-in-prison film where rape, lesbian-action and violent torture games are daily routine. The guards are crazier than the prisoners and the institution is protected by an impotent governor who only gets sexually aroused when he spots a girl having sex with a dog (!). The girls are all very beautiful and naked throughout the entire film, yet you can't really enjoy this sight with all the perversion going on. The dubious highlights include a barbaric hunting game (you can guess what he prey is), a duel-to-death between a guard and a prisoner and the image of a poor girl having a needle injected all the way through her nipple. Auch! Avoid this sick mess and you'll save yourself the trouble of taking TWO baths in order to wash the filth off.

Sadomania is the infamous Women in Prison flick by the king of ultra low budget exploitation films, Jesus Franco, Spain. He has made many immortal films like Love Letter of the Portuguese Nun (nunsploitation, 1977) and Bloody Moon (ultra-gore, 1981), and even though some of his films are worse and not-so-ambitious, he definitely has a talent and is noteworthy film maker. His greatest masterpiece of the films I've managed to see is Awful Dr. Orlof (1962), the black and white horror classic with Howard Vernon. Sadomania is among his dirtiest films and not without a reason.The ridiculous plot has a newly wed young couple, who is kidnapped during their journey as they drive their wedding car somewhere in Spain. They are taken to the nearby women prison, led by sadistic lesbian warden (the late Ajita Wilson) and some sleazy governor and his wife, and despite the fact that the prison girls/women work hard there, their real reason to be there is to satisfy these leaders' bottomless sexual desires and perversions. Poor women are raped and abused, in the guaranteed Franco style, but it all ends happily for the protagonists and evil and horny sadists meet their fate, again Franco style.This film is okay if one happens to like these kind of "guilty pleasures" with huge amount of nudity and love making. The sleaze-o-meter is taken as high as possibly when considered the fact that the head warden Wilson was originally born man, but changed his sex to female, and the close ups of this attractive black lady show that her hands and some parts of the body are definitely male and thus her attractiveness tones down a bit (for hetero sexual man), but still, she is very sensual here, albeit her role character is more than repulsive. The other actors are more or less amateurs, but also talented ones. Beautiful females get naked a lot, and that's the thing Franco has always been able to do. Perhaps every frame of the film "once it gets going" involves at least one naked human being, usually female.The "message" of this film seems to be that of what hides under our "civilized" surface and what kind of animals we are deep inside. Franco uses plenty of segments without a dialogue and some symbolic scenes (like the knife-fight-to-the-death scene), which show and depict the wild beast psyche what hides inside every human being, but in many cases un-active. Another thing is, that the sadists in the film are totally insatiable and hungry for sex, which is perhaps the strongest instinct in human nature and psyche. Sadomania shows us the faces of human nature we wouldn't necessarily want to face, but as we think about the state of the world and what kind of things take place, Franco's thoughts are more than true and serious. The fact that this film is mostly exploitation oriented doesn't mean that the film couldn't have any artistic merits, and Franco definitely wants most of his films to be more than mere exploitation.Sadomania is noteworthy piece of Franco cinema, and shot with his usual zooms and beautiful images of nature, stained only by the presence of the film's ugly and evil protagonists. Sadomania has also some interesting elements in its soundtrack, which is supposedly composed by the director himself. I give Sadomania 7/10 rating, but that's only possible if one can watch these films and appreciate them despite their many filthy scenes and characters.

This is the story of a young woman, kidnapped on her honeymoon, and send to a womens prison, somewhere in the latin world. Her husband spends the rest of the movie trying to save her. That, however is only an excuse for a story, as the real focus of the film are the scenes of degradation committed to the female inmates. This being a Jess Franco movie, you know you're in for a treat, if you're a badfilm fan. It is reprehensible, but most of all, this movie is just silly fun although in a seriously un-PC way. The film is astonishingly misogynistic, and that is unforgivable, but it is fun to see how cheaply this movie was made. A prisoner is eaten by a plastic crocodile, guards are armed with toyguns, the governors car is a beaten up Simca 2000 and the costumes are a riot. Jess Franco himself, however, has the most memorable scene in the movie as he is sodomised by a black youth in his role as a slavetrader. The role as the prisonwarden is played by the late american transsexual actress Ajita Wilson.