I am a fan of Jess Franco's bizarre style, and a lover even of his trashier films, and my personal opinion is that he has, besides several very entertaining movies, also created a few masterpieces, such as the brilliant "Paroxismus" aka "Venus In Furs" of 1969, for example. It is, however, an undeniable fact that the 180+ movies this highly prolific filmmaker has directed in his career, also include a bunch of big time stinkers. "Sadomania" of 1981 certainly is one of these stinkers, just an utterly bad and plot less movie with the ability to bore the hell out of you in spite of constant sleaze and nudity.Sure, the constant nudity will keep you entertained for 20 minutes, but since it keeps going on and on like that one is pretty likely to get bored after a short time. The only thing that really kept me watching this was the intensity of the sleaze which is, generously spoken, slightly amusing.After couple of newlyweds get lost in the desert on some island, they are stopped by a bunch of topless women carrying guns, wardens of a local prison camp. While the husband is banished from the island, the wife is taken to the prison camp, a place of torture and sexual humiliation, reigned by the sadistic nymphomaniac Magda and an extremely perverted governor. The prisoners are, of course, entirely hot chicks, most of them blondes, the wardens are entirely topless women carrying rifles.The plot, if one can call it that, is extremely stupid of course, but who is going to watch this for a good plot anyway. The (only) interesting thing about "Sadomania" is the high level of exploitation, even for a 'Women In Prison' film. There are probably two short scenes in the movie where we see a woman actually wearing a top, the sleaze contains all kinds of sexual perversions from rape to bestiality, and some of the torture scenes are really nasty.It is amazing that a film with this extreme level of sleaze, however, can still be so boring. The sleaze will keep you watching in the beginning, but after the first 45 minutes I actually had a hard time not to fall asleep. It also makes me wonder why, out of all pornstars, Jess Franco chose Ajita Wilson, who was, according to most sources, a transsexual who had been born a man (well, maybe for exactly that reason). If you really want to watch this, make sure you have enough beer at home to sit through it and watch it for the sleaze and exploitation only (and maybe for the slight unintentional fun factor). Don't expect to be highly entertained, however, it is almost unbelievable how a movie with such a high sleaze level can be so boring. I am a Jess Franco fan and I always will be, but "Sadomania" is just bad. 2/10

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 starts with newly weds Michel (Angel Caballero) & Olga Gordon (Uta Koepke) taking a little detour on the way to their honeymoon & ending up in the middle of a place called 'Hacienda Blanca' which just happens to be a rehabilitation camp for delinquent women, Franco's description not mine... It quickly turns out that they are trespassing on private land, they are quickly arrested by topless gun-wielding female guards & taken to the camps sadistic warden, Magda Urtado (Ajita Wilson, a transsexual & porn star born Goerge Wilson). Michel is told to bugger off & never come back while his unfortunate bride Olga is taken prisoner & after having her top removed is thrown in the cells where she meets some of the other topless inmates & the topless guards. Poor Olga is made to work in the blazing sun, topless of course, & Olga quickly discovers that 'Hacienda Blanca' is a hell hole where the inmates have no rights, the officials are corrupt & everyone is constantly topless! Governor Mendoza (Antonio Mayans as Robert Foster) shows up & picks a woman for a hunt, a hunt in which an inmate is given a one minute (one minute? Thanks for nothing!) head-start before she is shot, sounds fair to me. Governor Mendoza is impotent & his wife Loba (Gina Janssen) isn't too happy about it so she has lesbian sex with inmates like Tara (Ursula Buchfellner) whom she then sells to Mario (Otto Retzer) who in turn sells her to Lucas (director Jesus Franco) who forces Tara to work in his brothel. Inmates like Conito (Andrea Guzon) are forced to fight to the death in gladiatorial combat with the guards, topless of course, & if they survive these tortures the Governor's pet Alsatian dog is ready for some loving...This Spanish West German co-production was co-written & directed by notorious Euro sleaze peddler Jesus Franco & considering I usually loathe Franco & his films I found Sadomania somewhat entertaining. The script by Franco & Gunter Ebert certainly isn't boring like most of Franco's sorry attempts at film-making, in fact it moves along at a nice pace & something is always happening to keep most Euro exploitation fans happy. There are hunts which end in the target being shot & then eaten by crocodiles, gladiatorial combat between topless women, an Alsatian dog rapes a tied up woman, lesbian sex, someone has a pin stuck in their nipple, women are beaten, groped, raped, humiliated & generally treated like dirt which is where my biggest problem with Sadomania lies. I simply dislike the overall tone & feel of Sadomania, my best friend at the moment is a 23 year old girl & I simply take no pleasure in seeing females treated like they have no feelings, treated like they are only on Earth to sexually please & nothing else & I found it a little hard as a male to enjoy all this depravity. Yes, I know it's only a film & as a film I liked it & even though it's a little longish at over 100 minutes it passed the time painlessly enough. There is no real story in Sadomania just a collection of incidents which lead up to the eventual prison break & rather abrupt ending. Characters just come & go, Sadomania never really focuses on any particular one, it dishes the nastiness out evenly! If it's nudity your after then Sadomania is a dream come true, I don't think I've ever seen another film with so much nudity in it, just about every sequence has nudity of some sort. The violence is far more restrained with a few whippings, a few fights, a needle piercing a nipple & a few gunshot wounds but none of these are what I would call particularly graphic. The acting is as good as one would expect, transsexual Ajita has a real screen presence & is pretty intimidating as the obligatory sadistic warden. Technically Sadomania is cheap, very cheap. Shot on location the cinematography is OK & there is a nice scene when two women have a fight against a purple blueish setting sun in silhouette. Overall I disliked the tone & derogatory attitude towards women but at the same time I found myself enjoying Sadomania for what it was. I'm in two minds about it, I've given it an above average 6 because when all said & done I'd probably watch it again. Also, I bet Franco saved a fortune on the costumes...

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.