REVIEW: ‘Bamboo House of Dolls’ (1973)

KING BOXER star Lo Lieh is a Chinese interpreter and double agent helping several women led by a Red Cross nurse (Birte Tove) escape from a hellish Japanese war-time prison camp for women while tracking down stolen gold. BAMBOO HOUSE OF DOLLS is Shaw Brothers’ uninspired spin on the lurid women-in-prison (WIP) sub-genre of exploitation cinema, mixed with the World War II sub-genre of action. It contains stock sex, nudity, torture, fetishes, and cat fighting along with limited gun and martial arts combat. With the studio’s backing, production scale is above average for the genre and direction from Kwei Chih-hung (THE DELINQUENT) is competent but the end result is still nearly two hours of unsavory banality that is still tamer and less creative than its Western progenitors.

The film’s English title is an obvious reference to producer Roger Corman’s THE BIG DOLL HOUSE, another WIP film that was released two years earlier. That film, which co-starred Pam Grier in her first notable starring role, was a huge commercial success for the B-movie maven and possibly inspired Shaw Brothers to try their hand at the sub-genre.

BAMBOO HOUSE OF DOLLS ditches the criminal element of Corman’s film in favor of nationalism, a theme that was dominating the genre films of Hong Kong at the time beginning with Jimmy Wang Yu throttling Japanese opponents in THE CHINESE BOXER, one of them coincidently played by Lo Lieh.

As a result of Japan’s occupation of China, local women have been rounded up and are forced to entertain Japanese soldiers. The film centers a several women including three Caucasians and three Chinese. One of them is the wife of a slain guerilla who had recovered a large shipment of stolen gold from the Japanese and stashed it before his death. With help from two undercover agents who are after the gold, she and several of her friends attempt to escape after enduring torture and sexual abuse.

The premise does have historical founding. During the war, Japan forced thousands of women from occupied territories into prostitution for the gratification of its military personnel. As a purely commercial-driven exploitation movie, BAMBOO HOUSE OF DOLLS is not respectful of this fact even though the perpetrators eventually pay their karmic dues.

Veteran character actor Wang Hsieh portrays the resident military commander while Terry Liu makes her screen debut as the prison camp’s lesbian dominatrix. She plays the most memorable character, a woman who sexually torments a young Caucasian prisoner (Roska Rozen) and wields her pistol with intentional phallic overtones. Meanwhile, Wang repeatedly forces himself upon a blond-haired nurse played by Scandinavian softcore actress Birte Tove and later battles Lo Lieh with a sword.

The film is unique for the studio beyond it’s depiction of flagrant nudity and sexual acts, both of which could have been scandalous, career-ending performances for any of SB’s famous leading ladies. This was before the days when a former softporn star like Shu Qi could enjoy a career as an A-list actress. Even more unusual is the casting of Birte Tove, a blond-haired Danish star in the female lead role opposite Lo Lieh. Not only that, but Tove has a romantic onscreen relationship with him. Forget about the exploitation stuff, the idea of an Asian male having romantic and sexual relations with a Caucasian female onscreen is virtually unheard of, even 35 years later where worldwide audiences are still treated to interracial romances where guys like Jason Statham in THE TRANSPORTER and Ewan McGregor in THE PILLOW BOOK get the Asian ladies while Jet Li and Chow Yun-fat get to look stoic. Bruce Lee wasn’t so deprived in ENTER THE DRAGON and probably would have been able to permanently alter the stuffy image of Asian males in film had he lived longer but that’s another topic.

Besides whippings and cat fighting, action is largely reserved for the third act as the prisoners make their getaway and are pursued by the guards. Here, the movie makes the mistake of loosing its way as a WIP film and turns into THE GREAT ESCAPE with Lo Lieh hopping the prison wall with a conspicuously modern and poorly camo-painted car. Later, a little martial arts and gunplay action occurs when the Japanese soldiers are ambushed by Chinese rebels.

Ironically, about the only real Japanese person associated with the movie was working behind the camera. The film’s action is directed by Yasukoshi Shikamura, a choreographer and stunt actor who was previously called on by Kwei to supervise modern action sequences in THE LADY PROFESSIONAL and KISS OF DEATH. It’s hard to speak on the quality of his action choreography, particularly when the film intentionally goes for low-brow brawling and semi-realism. The action is definitely closer to what you would find in a Hollywood movie at the time.

Wang Fu-ling is credited for the film’s music but all the tunes that audiences will likely remember were lifted from Italian film scores by the great Ennio Moriconne. The film’s distinctive theme was originally written by Morricone for the movie IL GIARDINO DELLE DELIZIE (1967). This and another number that plays during a bathing scene add a lot of style to the movie, more than it deserves.

This was the movie that set director Kwei Chih-hung on course for a career in exploitation that led to similarly sensational films like THE KILLER SNAKES, SPIRIT OF THE RAPED and CORPSE MANIA. Such output from Shaw Brothers, the studio that also produced stately costume epics like EMPRESS DOWAGER and hundreds of action-packed kung fu and wuxia films shows that they were intent on maintaining dominance over Hong Kong’s film industry by meeting the needs of audiences with widely differing tastes. In the case of BAMBOO HOUSE OF DOLLS, it is a distinct lack of taste that is necessary to find entertainment value. It may also have been weak attempts like this to exploit overseas film trends rather than set trends that contributed to the demise of Shaw Brothers as a feature filmmaking entity.

Those interested in women-in-prison films can find better examples with Jonathan Demme’s CAGED HEAT (1974), the aforementioned BIG DOLL HOUSE and Toei’s FEMALE PRISONER #701: SCORPION series starring LADY SNOWBLOOD’s Meiko Kaji. As for other Hong Kong output, there are no other WIP films worthy of mention. However, there are other exploitation films with similar themes that are recommended including INTIMATE CONFESSIONS OF A CHINESE COURTESAN, NAKED KILLER and RIKI-OH: THE STORY OF RICKY (1991).

Related Topics: Bamboo House of Dolls (1973), exploitation, gallery, gunplay, Lo Lieh, nudity, Shaw Brothers, torture, war, women in prison