Scrubbers (1984)

I'll tell you why so serious

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Caught this years ago at a Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. They showed it along with "Scum" which dealt with the horrors of teenage male prisoners in England. This deals with women in prison.The film focuses on two women who escape--one (Annetta) wants to visit her baby daughter who is being raised in a convent. The other (Carol) wants to be recaptured and sent to a prison where her girlfriend is. They're both recaptured but Annetta wrongly assumes that Carol ratted on her. Then they're both sent to the same prison and Annetta seeks revenge. It all leads to a depressing ending.Grim and brutal. There's no humor and no letup in the tension. All the actresses are (pretty obviously) too old to be playing 20 year olds but their acting is so good I was able to ignore it. Worth catching. Trying seeing it with "Scum" which is even more disturbing.

You may be expecting this to be Scum, but for women. You've rented the wrong movie. I had a few hangups with this one. For most of the part I was really trying to make sense of the film. I really expected this to be heavy, scary, full on, but No. Even the top dog, who ends up leaving the joint, isn't really bad, probably a little bad in the discreet way. The plot has two girls escaping, one, a bi mother who wants to collect her baby who's been taken from her, and the other girl, Carol, her lesbian lover just wants to get caught. When the two end back in the clink, the bi mother later, the story kind of becomes like in Bad Boys, where the bi mother is p..ed off at Carol, who thinks she dobbed her in, but it's Carol who then becomes pi..ed off because her returned cellmate has shacked up with a new bird. Funny as it's gonna sound, the high point of this film, is that prisoner's singing where she just won't shut up. You hear her a few times, through the film. Scrubbers is depressing, yes, but it just falls short on a lot of things. It's a too ordinary film, a big problem here, where it's plot has started from anywhere, and has left off at the end, as if half story, if you can relate to what I'm finished. It just didn't have a solid discipline of story. Scum stayed with you. This is more forgettable. A scrubber is a term for a low class of English woman.

I saw this expecting the typical WIP exploitation. Unfortunately it is a story told with a bleak reality and stark setting. I also hate to say this, but the girl whose child is in a convent , is so obnoxious that all we wish for is to have ill fall upon her. Yes she is also included in the worst slow motion sequence ever filmed. It looks like the girls were moving slow while filming at normal speed to get the action right then it was going to be sped up to look a vicious beating in real time. Someone forgot yo speed up the sequence and it looks like my kids playing super heroes in the back yard moving in super slo-mo. Actually my kids have better " mad skills". Yet I digress, on with the positive... This is a pretty good movie with solid performances with a few interesting story lines. The most exploitive part is that all the girls are attractive and obviously haggled up for their roles. I gave this a 7 because it was earnest and interesting...it is not " Prison a go go, or reform school girls, but if you want to watch women's OZ, then this is your flick.

The lesbian Carol Howden (Amanda York) and the troublemaker Annetta Brady (Chrissie Cotterill) escape from a reformatory for different reasons: Carol wants be arrested again and to go to Borstal, where her girlfriend is imprisoned, and Anneta wants to see her daughter in a foster house. They both are sent to Borstal, a prison for young women, where the whole story takes place. Annetta blames Carol for their new arresting. This English movie has a good performance of the cast. However, the characters are so badly developed that we, viewers, do not know the reasons and the motives why the women are confined in such a place. Their accents are horrible and the story has nothing different or special comparing with other movies of this theme. Watchable and forgettable. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): 'Aonde Nasce o Crime' ('Where The Crime is Born')