New inmate Marie (Maria Rohm) arrives at an island prison in the women's sector and receives the number 99. The inmates are controlled by the sadistic lesbian warden Thelma Diaz and Governor Santos (Herbert Lom) and submitted to torture, rape and lesbianism.

Apparently, this film "kicked off the genre in a new direction" and "was a big box office success in the U.S. in 1969." I find this somewhat hard to believe... because as much as I love exploitation and Jess Franco, this just is not all that great. Even with veteran actor Herbert Lom, it more or less has just a group of women wandering around doing a whole lot of nothing.

Not surprisingly, Franco continued to make more films in this genre, probably turning a quick profit: Women in Cell Block 9 (1978),Ilsa, The Wicked Warden (1977),Barbed Wire Dolls (1975),Women Behind Bars (1975),and Sadomania (1980).

99 Women is a women in prison film with a high calibre cast including Oscar winner Mercedes McCambridge as well as distinguished thespians Herbert Lom and Maria Schell.

These type of films have a mix of soft core sex action, lesbianism, some torture, even violent torture and a lots of campiness.

99 Women has decent production values, good acting but is dull as dishwater. The soft porn will send you to sleep. The story is just plain bad and the dubbing is nonsensical. The English dubbing just reverts to French at random moments.

It is bad and boring.

Giving a fine imitation of Bela Lugosi, Oscar winning actress Mercedes McCambridge joins the ranks of Esther Dale, Sara Allgood, Hope Emerson, Ida Lupino and Jeanne Cooper as tough or sadistic matrons/wardens in a women's prison. She's hard looking, hard acting, and the heart is as hard as granite. This is one of the many exploitation films that used lesbian subterfuge to pack in an audience, a sort of international Eurotrash drama that is tedious and often distasteful.

There's never an opportunity to get to know or understand any of the characters, only the element of 60's trash to try and sell. So in the amount of obviousness, there's also Maria Schnell as McCambridge's potential successor and "Pink Panther" foil Herbert Lom as the prisoner's governor and practically the only male character in the film. Around the prisoners, McCambridge dresses severely and extremely mannish, but in front of Lom, dresses extravagantly, as if to use the few womanly wiles she can to hold onto her job. She truly is a sight to behold.

While the DVD print is a ton of improvement over the old faded VHS print, it still struggles to give some reason for being other than the use of sex and violence to titillate. Brief flashbacks to several of the girl's pasts don't really endear them, and it just drags on and on. I'll rank this among the lowest of the women's prison films, because the exploitation elements just expose it for being cheap and vulgar with a waste of talents for a few middle of the road names who are more like cult figures today rather than real movie stars.