In days of clipper ships, a group of French women, criminals & political prisoners, are shipped off to Devil's Island.

This is very unlike the historical Devil's Island, for the prisoners are exclusively sexy babes in tattered Parisian gowns & push-up bras & silk stockings forced to get all dirty & sweaty panning for gold in a crocodile infested swamp while male guards whip & threaten them.

The adventures of The Women of Devil's Island (Le Prigioniere dell'isola del diavola, 1962) include evading horny guards, getting chained & beaten, trying to escape ideally with some of the gold they've panned, betraying one another, sacrificing for one another, & so on.

A piratical raid is made upon the island by Revolutionists wanting to use the gold to support the pending French Revolution. One of the main guys is hunky handsome Henri (Guy Madison makes quite a dashing imitation Errol Flynn) with whom one of the sexiest of the prisoners (Michele Mercier) falls in love.

The casting is by no means the worst thing about this cheapie, & the dubbing could certainly have been worse. Superficially Women of Devil's Island almost passes for a reasonable swashbuckling film instead of an historical variant of the fetishistic "women in prison" exploitation cinema.

But that lack of reasonable sets, the improbable costuming for prisoners, & a story that ranges from too minimalist to outright absurd, are insufficiently convincing. It's ultimately little more than a display of the hair-dos of unhappy women.

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