House of Cruel Dolls

Strange Eurocine sleaze about a girl who's forced into prostitution, made mostly from bits and pieces from other films... to make it even more puzzling, some of the newly shot footage (or is it? You can never be really sure when you're watching a Eurocine film) also ends up in the almost identical L' Oasis Des Filles Perdues, which I saw before this one. And just as in that routine sleaze film the action just drops dead in the middle for over 20 minutes from a 1960s spy film with Jack Taylor! It's very funny when the geniuses behind this opus try to mix the spy footage to make it appear as it's part of the sleaze flick! I really enjoyed this film but there is no way I can justify it.

House of Cruel Dolls (aKa House of Lost Dolls and La maison des filles perdues) is a 1974 exploitation film co-written and directed by Pierre Chevalier (The Panther Squad, Ladies House of Pleasure, and The Invisible Dead). It was co-written by the legendary Jesus Franco (Jailhouse Wardress, Golden Temple Amazons,Faceless, Zombie Lake, Barbed Wire Dolls, The Sadist of Notre Dame, Angel of Death, Diamonds of Kilimandjaro, and Sinfonía Erótica).

Yvette (played by: Magda Mundari from The Erotic Confessions of a Bed Too Welcoming, Deadly Sting, The Adulteress, and Godefinger ou Certaines chattes n'aiment pas le mou) after being liberated from a life of sex slavery in the barbaric bordello House of Cruel Dolls, tells her sordid story in flashback when a vicious gang of white slavers forces women into prostitution!!!!

Eurocine edited 1967's Sigma 3 into this one. It starts out with the original material for about the first 30 minutes then the previously shot spy thriller is included in the mix. It's kinda wild because actress Silvia Solar (Vicious and Nude, Adela, Cannibal Terror, Sinatra, Devil's Kiss, and Eyeball) appears in both films inside this one odd mix. I guess they wanted some continuity with the same person in the entire production. It's still a fun and very entertaining sleaze fest regardless of the bizarre editing thrown into it. Lots of beautiful women and none of them are shy in House of the Cruel Dolls so it's loaded with eye candy. The cast also includes Olivier Mathot, Jack Taylor, Remo De Angelis, and Sandra Julien. Don't expect a complete narrative that makes sense here but it's worth checking out just for everything that happens in this exploration flick!!!!

This could be described as a weird film or maybe just cheap, but when the name Jess Franco appears this should come as no surprise. This bit of Euro sleaze looks to have been assembled from two or more films giving the impression of a girl-trafficking film with a secret agent on the case. The film starts off well enough.

Magda Mundari plays Yvette, a girl rescued from a brothel and her story told in flashback. This is OK for about half an hour but then the film switches to a Jack Taylor film (the IMDb says Agente Sigma 3 - Missione Goldwather) in which our secret agent is put on the case. Silvia Solar also appears in both films, in both cases being part of the criminal gangs, so perhaps the two films merge - up to a point. Then there is the part on board a ship where some more girls are being held captive. Again, it looks like a Jack Taylor film but is this also from Agente Sigma or another film? Who knows?

Is this film worth a look? If you like really sleazy Euro sexploitation films then it is a definite yes. Apart from the sleaziness of pinching some-one else's film, there are also plenty of sleazy scenes in which the very attractive girls get naked, both willingly and unwillingly; and also the sex scenes, again both willing and unwilling. These are the scenes that make a Euro sleaze film, but despite these comments, this is a bad film, so only two stars.

I have watched enough grimy 1970s Eurotrash to know when a film is merely sleazy versus when it is genuinely confused about its own identity, and "House of Cruel Dolls" lands firmly in the latter category. This is what happens when someone, presumably producer Marius Lesoeur or director Pierre Chevalier, decided midway through production that a white slavery exploitation film needed to also be a spy procedural, then stitched the two together with all the grace of a drunk surgeon. The result is not entertainingly bad; it is tediously incoherent, a slog through repetitive scenes that exist only to fill runtime between flashes of nudity.

The film opens with Magda Mundari as Yvette, naked and supposedly trapped in some vague prison brothel, being "rescued" by Raymond Schettino's Mr. Gaston in a sequence that feels like it was imported from a different movie entirely. They end up at a police station where the structure collapses into an endless flashback, and suddenly we are watching Olivier Mathot's Mr. Raski run his trafficking operation with the enthusiasm of a man filing taxes. Mathot looks bored, frankly, and I cannot blame him. The scenes of women being groped in garages and cargo holds repeat so often they become visual wallpaper, numbing rather than shocking. There is no tension, no escalation, just the same dingy locations and the same leering henchmen, particularly Claude Boisson doing his best thug impression with zero menace.

Then, without warning, Jack Taylor shows up as Special Agent Jack, and the film pivots into spy territory. Taylor, a capable actor in better projects, wanders through Tangiers and Barcelona looking like he is searching for the actual script. His scenes have a different texture entirely: suddenly there are government agencies, intel gathering, mysterious reassignments. Sandra Jullien enters as Magda, another agent, and her infiltration of Raski's operation should be the film's centerpiece, but instead it becomes another protracted assault sequence in that godforsaken cargo hold. The film treats sexual violence as filler content, devoid of consequence or emotional weight, just another exploitative beat to pad the runtime. When Jullien finally karate chops her way out and Taylor arrives for a shootout, it feels less like a climax and more like the film remembered it needed an ending.

What lingers is not any particular image or performance, but the overwhelming sense of waste. You can feel two separate films here: one a tawdry exploitation piece about kidnapped women (done poorly but at least coherent), the other a Eurospy thriller with agents and international intrigue (also done poorly). Spliced together, they cancel each other out. The spy elements drain any transgressive energy the exploitation angle might have had, while the endless brothel scenes bog down any momentum the espionage plot tries to generate. Neither story gets room to breathe, let alone develop characters or stakes. Yvette disappears for long stretches. Jack appears too late to matter. Raski never registers as a threat.

The technical execution matches the narrative confusion. Cinematography is flat, lighting harsh and unflattering, editing abrupt and disorienting, not in a stylish way but in a "we shot this in a week" way. The score, when present, is generic library music that seems unaware of what is happening onscreen. No single frame suggests anyone involved cared about craft or atmosphere. Compare this to something like "Thriller: A Cruel Picture," which uses exploitation tropes within a revenge framework that at least commits to its own ugliness, or even Jess Franco's sleazier work, which maintains a perverse internal logic. "House of Cruel Dolls" commits to nothing, believes in nothing, and consequently offers nothing.

This will appeal to exactly two types of viewers: completists cataloging every Eurocrime exploitation hybrid from the 1970s, or audiences seeking unintentional comedy in narrative disaster. Everyone else, even those with high tolerance for low budget exploitation, will find this a chore. It is not shocking enough to provoke, not stylish enough to admire, not incompetent enough to laugh at. It simply exists, inert and exhausting, a reminder that sometimes two bad ideas combined do not create something interestingly terrible, just something twice as dull.