Stevieboy666 Greta, Wanda or Ilsa the Wicked Warden, different names, same movie. This is a Jess Franco movie so within the first 2 minutes we have a bunch of naked women in a shower room, their substantial pubic hair almost hitting you in the face! This, an unofficial addition to the notorious Ilsa series, focuses more on sex & nudity (well, it is a Franco movie) than the violence of the other films. Having said that there's a very bloody fate in store for our Dyanne at the end. One other bonus is that we get to see a lot more of her ample charms than in previous outings. Released as Ilsa the Wicked Warden in the UK it's cut by 2m 31s.

Kaliyugaforkix I like ugly films, that aren't sterile and prettified by superficial gloss. This leads me into a lot of shady areas, because the spotless, empty media we do have is utterly retarded & absolutely everywhere. I'll happily stand for the movies that use this tangibility in entirely negative ways. If something makes me feel like showering after and praying to Jesus while I rock to & fro- mission accomplished. Even if it's repulsive & indefensible, it's still alive. If I'm going to watch movies I want to feel this stuff, not be pillow talked by processed slop. I open like this because this flick is surely one of those shows that makes you ponder taking a pumice stone to your eyeballs. Hallelujah. Make no mistake, Jess Franco is dye-in-the-wool pervert & not shy about it. He obviously has an…affinity for the material that makes for a creepy sort of dedication. He isn't joking with his sick WIP cycle, they aren't easy to laugh off like the others I've seen.The gloriously tacky ILSA series is consistent in its portrait of the inquisitor madam & her devotion to pain- glamorous, beautiful, power loving & sexually insatiable, one moment smooth & pleasing and the next sadistically merciless- but it hops back n forth all through the 20th century, from hot spot to hot spot, drawn to evil like a fly to dung. It helps to jettison any idea of chronology here & just think of Ilsa as a kind of vampire, popping up wherever there's bad vibes to leech on a massive scale; deposed & killed in one era and rising in another to feed again- you can't keep a good woman down. Her first adventure was the exploitation classic SHE WOLF OF THE SS, where Ilsa found herself right at home with the goose stepping jackboots of the Third Reich, then HAREM KEEPER OF THE OIL SHEIKS where she frolicked in a desert hellhole, onto the TIGRESS OF SIBERIA which found Ilsa getting up to her old tricks in the gulags of Soviet Russia & finally here- running a banana republic asylum in typical hands-on style. Dyanne Thorne's third reprisal of the blood thirsty succubus is a grind house goody, but only viewers blessed with strong constitutions need bother. It isn't the typical Chicks-in- chains enterprise that a trash mongrel expects, where bad taste is balanced by rival factors like low production values, wooden acting or camp sensibility (HAREM KEEPER).It includes the standard ingredients the genre demands yet takes them so far out that those deflating factors aren't enough to dampen the stench. I've read the charge that this jaunt down debauchery lane might've been a firecracker in its day but the preceding three decades have softened its bite. no no NOAs the movie's titular warden, Ilsa reigns supreme over a mental hospital for deviant women. While the inmates have full frontal romps in filthy public showers with butch lesbo guards leering on, Ilsa relaxes after a long day of depravity at the office, sinking her generous bosoms in a luxuriant bubble bath, inter-cut with a prisoner gunned down while trying to escape sans underwear (no inmate here is permitted the privilege of undergarments- yea, that's the level were on here). This prompts the victim's sister Abby to have herself committed to expose the goings down at Las Palamas before more innocents die at the hands of our sadistic bitch goddess and her lackeys. Predictably, Ilsa's magic touch has transformed the hospital into a den of twisted sex games, a gulag for political prisoners, a snuff movie production house. Got all that?What a gust of foul air. The bottom barrel method captures every sq mm of grime, minimalistic compared to the last two; slow but vicious. They were colourful and this is low-key & subdued: a slow burn. It sure floored me, sneaking the Anchor Bay reissue during my teenage years & imagining the delicious horrors that waited. Finally I would see a Jess Franco movie, one of those reviled raunch-o-ramas; a real test of my mettle. Non stop nudity, acid douches, human toilet paper, electro shock therapy, whippings, beatings, rapes- yeah, we're not in Kansas anymore Toto. Sigh.The constant barrage of dehumanization is numbing & any technical deficiencies just get swallowed up by the atmosphere of jaw dropping mean spiritedness. Just that general atmosphere of extreme human backwardness can hurt your head after awhile. Again, Jess Franco takes the skeleton of old comic book adventures/exotic serials & injects all his usual sexual sickness into it. Dyanne Thorne's hammy accent is not so yuck-worthy when she's holding a plastic bag over someone's skull or jamming needles close-up into flesh; I never feel more like I'm wading through the twisted jerk-off fantasies of a pulp obsessed teenager than during Franco's WIP stuff. It's a cartoon shot with porno flatness to authentically capture the intensity of S&M.After the tongue-in-cheek approach of its predecessor the randy little Spaniard takes the series back to its roots: undiluted in-your-face shock value, with a heavier emphasis on eroticism only un-softened by any of his usual dreamy proclivities, save one scene. What we're left with is a bleak parade of suffering, extreme sleaze only amplified by the crude, dingy realization of the material. Jess puts all other WIP movies to shame: its not light naughty fun; its pervy uncle,goose-you- under-the-dinner table uncomfortable. Standout image here: a woman being calmly asphyxiated by Ilsa, the bag over her face inflated by death rattles as her eyes bulge. Ugh. This will be what stays with me from THE WICKED WARDEN. People with bags over their heads are just plain horrifying; they've been reduced to giant veal cutlets in a special way.

slayrrr666 "Ilsa, The Wicked Warden" is one of the very best of the Women-in-Prison genre.**SPOILERS**After several mysterious events, Abbie Phillips, (Tania Busselier) decides to go undercover in the Los Palomas Medical Clinic to investigate the strange reports that have been coming out of the facility. Immediately upon entering, the boss Greta, (Dyanne Thorne) tells her the rules of surviving, and issuing her a number for the others, throws her in with the other there. Attempting to cure her of her sexual deviance that she was sent there for, she finds that other inmate Juana, (Lina Romay) is actually a stooge for her and her different sadistic tendencies. After spending several weeks in the facility, she finds that the whole place is merely a prison for her to keep around other women for her own sexual desires, then turning them into illegal stars in secret snuff films when they've outlived their usefulness. Realizing that had happened to her own sister, who was in the facility, she goes out to help them others still trapped overthrow the prison and get out alive.The News: Though there isn't much new ground to this, it's still one of the better entries possible. Just like with most Women-in-Prison films, the main focus here is on the sleaze and nudity, which this one carries out with abundance. The film starts off with a full-on shower scene, inter-cut by another showing the warden in a bathtub taking a bubble-bath and washing herself down, and this is done for several minutes to open up the film, which is about the best possible way to do so. There's a later shower scene that is by far one of the single sleaziest parts of the film, where the new girl is forced to soap down another, including all of the body parts, and upon refusing to do so further, degenerates into a nude cat-fight in the middle of the shower. The fact that the uniforms are merely just a shirt barely covering the privates is another fantastic device for allowing nudity, as it results in it being flung open all the time or riding up to allow more. The strip-down and hose-off upon arrival generates more nudity, though the nature of the scenes and what's accomplished lead more into the sleaze category, and is simply a part of the film as well. The torture and S&M content is ferocious and brutal, with prisoners strung up on large chains or other devices and then furiously whipped with a large whip, or injected with a red-hot brand to the nether-regions, among other particularly disturbing scenes. There's also the wonderful scene where Greta sticks needles into the breasts of her lesbian lover, then lays on top of her to drive them in, which is mostly done through the use of close-up but carries out for so long that it's just and incredibly suspenseful and uncomfortable scene that really sticks out, more so since the participants are both nude for the duration. Aside from that, the film also works due to the pretty passable job Franco did on this one. There is some plot and some character development, an actual beginning-middle-end structure, and, most surprising, some unexpectedly solid camera-work, with very little of his characteristic zoom lens obsession. It's surprisingly restrained for the most part, non-characteristically reliant upon lighting and production design to create the mood. The trademark style still comes through in the odd scene, the best being the red filtered, out-of-focus tryst between the two lovers in a darkened room, with a glass purposefully placed to obscure the fumbling and groping. This is fantastic and really makes a case for the best directed scene in his career. The only flaws in here are the really confusing ending. We get this weirdness where the warden gets eaten alive by the inmates, and as the bunch of naked lesbians chow down on the camp commandant, the whole scene inter-cut with stock-footage of lions, tigers and so forth eating dead animal flesh. The purpose of what's going in is implied, but it's merely so outrageous that beginning to understand it becomes a lost cause, thrown in merely for more gore. The last, and most obvious flaw, is that, despite all the nudity and sadism on display, this now appears restrained in it's depiction of sex and violence. The film is decidedly tame and avoids showing anything particularly nasty, as even the scene in which the warden pierces her breasts with needles is restrained, with the camera cutting away from the actual violence to show the reaction on the face, showing relatively little in that scene aside from the moment when they press their breasts together. This is a little confusing, as why it decided to hold back on the one area it really could've worked wonders in to make it a classic, but as it is, these few problems are what hold this one down at all.The Final Verdict: About as sleazy as any other entry in the genre with a lot more going for it, this is a really nice upper-tier Women-in-Prison entry that really works. Seek it out immediately if you're a fan of any of the main creative cast, an avid follower of the genre or exploitation in general, otherwise steer clear of this.Rated UR/NC-17: Full Nudity, several strong sex scenes, Graphic Violence and Graphic Language

HumanoidOfFlesh Being a fan of tasteless "Ilsa" series and Jesus Franco's sleazy filth I always wanted to see "Greta:The Mad Butcher".Thankfully I just bought uncut DVD of this film and wasn't disappointed.The film,in which starred Dyanne Thorne,was later repackaged as an Ilsa movie and there was in plans a fourth official film under the title "Ilsa Meets Bruce Lee in the Devil's Triangle",unfortunately it never got made.Thorne plays Greta del Pino,who runs correction centre for women somewhere in the jungles of South America.Women are tortured and degraded for her sadistic pleasure.However one of the inmates Abby leads the prisoners to revolt..."Greta:The Mad Butcher" is a sleazy and depraved exploitation pick that contains tons of full-frontal nudity and sleaze.A must-see for anyone into WIP cinema.