"99 Women" starring Oscar-winner Mercedes McCambridge as a sadistic prison warden and Maria Schell as a super-intendant with lesbionic tendencies towards one of the female inmates, who'd have thought that you could have gone wrong with this one? Apparently not me as I was quite excited about my purchase of this movie. It was pretty horrible as expected, but not in a good way. I was hoping this was going to be one of those hilarious women-in-prison exploitation flicks that were high in camp value. Hell, Mercedes McCambridge is in it! First off, the movie started off positively. We have three broads arriving on a boat, still in the clothes they were apparently arrested in, tried in Court, and then literally, sent up the river in! We are introduced to the blonde starlet, Marie, the black-haired stripper, Helga, and some other brunette who dies from some sort of "accident" that required medical surgery.<br /><br />The camp factor needle hits "HIGH" as soon as we are introduced to Mercedes McCambridge appearing in a warden's uniform, barking orders in a faux-German accent (even though her name is Thelma Diaz) and giving Marie a backhand across the face for using her name instead of her number, "99".<br /><br />However it only gets worse from here. While there are certainly some entertaining cat-fight scenes (ie hair-pulling, clothes being ripped off, face slapping, etc), the rest of the film is incredibly boring. There is a sadistic male warden (Herbert Lom) who coerces one of the female prisoners into seducing Marie for his pleasure, and there is one un-named prison guard who has the most hilarious facial expressions when introducing guests to McCambridge, but the rest of the film falls flat.<br /><br />Maria Schell is not in the film nearly enough, and when she is, it's hard to determine what her true agenda is. It seems like she has a thing for Marie, but they never explore it.<br /><br />When the girls finally break out and trek through a "jungle", there are a few more camp moments, such as the scene with the harmless snake where upon spotting it and instead of running around it, the girls proceed to scream, grab it and cut it with a knife (LOL). The other semi-amusing moment was watching Marie and Helga make a dash for the fishing boats, hand-in-hand and wearing nothing short of see-through panties and torn jumpsuits.<br /><br />Mercedes McCambridge was the movie's only saving grace. Her accent border-lined German and Spanish, and she had some pretty hilarious one-liners such as, "She was put in the punishment cell... for repeated insolences!" At various moments, her voice deepened into that same voice she used as Pazuzu in "The Exorcist", I thought maybe she was going to morph into Satan at any moment.<br /><br />The most interesting thing that I heard about this movie was that there is an X-rated version out there. I watched the un-rated version which had no explicit sex scenes, only some gratuitous breast shots and a glimpse of bush. I shudder at the thought that Mercedes McCambridge might have filmed a scene not knowing that at some later point her body double would be enjoying an explicit lesbian sex scene with one of the female prisoners.<br /><br />I would not recommend this movie to any women-in-prison enthusiasts out there. In fact, I would only recommend this movie to Mercedes McCambridge fans as she is the sole reason I gave this movie "one star". Don't waste your time with this one folks.