1,000 Convicts and a Woman!

Ray Austin’s 1,000 Convicts and a Woman! (aka Fun and Games, subtitled “A Portrait of a Nymphomaniac”) tells the story of Angela Thorne (Alexandra Hay), the daughter of a prison warden who visits the grounds for an extended stay and creates a wave of chaos. She has an insatiable appetite for men and lures them into giving her affection. If they refuse, she threatens to tell her daddy that they assaulted her. Let’s see who he believes: Her, the warden’s beloved daughter, or them, a convicted criminal?

The structure of the film is a basic one: Angela seduces an inmate, guard, or camper right outside the prison grounds, whoever happens to be around at any given time. They snog her gently and she frolics away. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat. It goes on like this for an excruciating 90-minute run time.

How could a movie about a nymphomaniac running around a men’s prison be so painfully dull? It feels as if Ned Flanders had directed an exploitation film. It has cheap thrills, but it pussyfoots around them. The nudity is scant. The violence is damn near nonexistent. All we have is a weak character study of one of the most irritating characters I can recall being subjected to in recent history. And no meaningful insight is given to her. Why does Angela act the way she does? What makes her tick? Apparently, in the film’s teary-eyed finale, because she doesn’t get enough attention.

Angela is pretty, in a Bette Davis kind of way, but spending any time with her in watching this film is an endurance test. Every minute, on the minute, she drops this haughty, disdainful, insincere laugh. I understand the reasoning behind it—she’s an empty vessel of a human and her laugh is just as dry and empty. But it happens so often, and so frequently, that it just sounds like a nervous tic. It’s less a character trait and more a symptom of Tourette’s. The prison setting, too, looks less like a prison and more like a deluxe country club where prisoners are allowed to freely roam the grounds, unsupervised. For a prison movie about the warden’s horny daughter getting into trouble, it feels a lot more like a mildly rambunctious teenager turning some heads at boarding school.

My favorite exchange occurs somewhere near the end and it perfectly encapsulates the quality of scripting. Angela has seduced a prisoner and has been caught by her father. Angela immediately throws the prisoner under the bus and says he attacked her. Her story is corroborated by a crooked guard. A witness to it all enters the scene and tells the warden, “These two are lying!” To which the guard replies, “Are you accusing me of being a liar?!”

1,000 Convicts and a Woman! should have been a slam-drunk of a sexploitation picture but it gets so bogged down in the minutiae of the day-to-day prison operations that it forgets to be entertaining. It often forgets that it’s supposed to be a sleazy piece of trash. I’m not entirely sure who this picture was made for. It’s bad, but not in an endearing way. It’s just bad. And, worst of all, it’s boring.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
1,000 Convicts and a Woman! is printed on a single-disc Blu-ray that contains the feature film, plus supplemental materials. The single disc is housed in a standard case with removable slipcover. The slipcover and the case contain identical artwork, although the case has a reversible sleeve, with one side featuring a slightly different color scheming on the same overall poster design.

Kino Lorber has done a terrific job on its video transfer of 1,000 Convicts and a Woman! I may have complained about the film itself (and I will continue to do so for the rest of my life), but the 1080p high-definition video presentation is very, very good. The image is clean, sharp and clear. There may be the occasional speck of dirt, dust or other debris here and there, but it’s very infrequent. Organic film grain is clear throughout the film’s run time. Other minor imperfections pop up here and there, but have more to do with the film’s production than with Kino’s restoration process. There was some pulsating shadow noise during an early nighttime sequence, but that’s due to film stock used for lowlight sequences. Overall, colors look great (even if muted, which was the style for late 60s, early 70s flicks like this) and features are very sharp.

1,000 Convicts and a Woman! provides viewers with a lossless 2.0 mono mix encoded in DTS-HD MA. The mix is surprisingly active and robust for a monaural, front-only soundstage, balancing a bizarre, bongo-heavy score, a Tom Jones wannabe theme song and the usual sound effects common in these kinds of features. Dialogue, through it all, is clear and balanced above the action. The sound mix is also free from sounding muffled or with popping sounds during dialogue sequences. Like the video presentation, it’s quite clear and pristine.

There aren’t a lot of features here, but what we do have is pretty good: You’ve got an audio commentary from Dylan Dean Stanley, lead actress Alexandra Hay’s biographer, which also features archival interview snippets from director Ray Austin. There is also an 18-minute featurette with retrospective reviews from cast and crew members.

• Audio Commentary - Alexandra Hay biographer Dylan Dean Staley (featuring archival interviews with director Ray Austin)
• "Having Fun Playing Games" (HD 18:09) - Featurette by James McCabe, featuring interviews with assistant director Graham Fowler, assistant director Nicholas Granby, stunt actor Paul Weston, and stunt actor Dinny Powell
• Trailers

1,000 Convicts and a Woman! is a bad movie, but a pretty decent Blu-ray. The video presentation looks great and the audio mix is crystal clear. There are also a handful of special features that provide some insight into the film’s production history. 1,000 Convicts and a Woman! is definitely Worth a Look, particularly for exploitation connoisseurs looking to broaden their understanding of late-60s/early-70s sensibly British smut.
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