It’s more a certainty, Howard Vernon's little reassuring face, Dietrich and Franco's names, or the title "Fraulein in Cellblock 9" or if you prefer "Tropical Inferno"? A bit of everything can be said but there is a need for certainties in life and to understand immediately that we are with other Women in Prison of the two is not bad..
Of course, "Tropical Inferno" apart from the beautiful title and the beautiful actresses adds nothing to the history of cinema or to Franco's career, but unlike many other similar works, there is a greater care behind the camera a part some inevitable absurdity.
The efforts of Jesus Franco ever banal here (but far from his masterpieces) is at the service of a story that show every commonplace of the genre and in which Vernon takes full advantage of his evil mask
A film almost divided into two parts, in which in first one we see tortures to the prisoners and the second their escape.
Susan Hemingway and Aida Gouveia, who worked only with Franco in their short careers, are the interpreters of two characters who with the more famous Esther Studer and Karin Gambier make up the victims. Always naked and sweaty (but they feel cold ...) are tortured by good Vernon and a warden interpreted by Dora Doll a famous French German actress. Why she is here is difficult to say, but she is the chief of this South American prison where they haven’t any pity for the traitors of the regime, that is, the four above that are caught in a truck while they try to escape. Vernon and Doll have a lot of fun, forcing Susan Hemingway to lick the warden's vagina and drinking Champagne with salt, putting Esther Studer naked on a piece of bent metal. Aida Guveia picks up electrodes and Karin Gambier is sodomized with a rhinoceros horn and a live mouse. All under the stupid and manic eyes of a guard. Yes, they are not good images, but nothing is seen, and the blood is definitely unreliable. As mentioned and as the canvas, the four escapes, naked of course, thanks to a very long lesbian sequence in the cell in which they eroticize a guard who loses the keys on a Brazilian music.
Here, "Tropical Inferno" loses a bit interest, showing exactly what's happening in WIPs, and alligators footage is useless to let us believe that the river where the fugitives flee is dangerous. They are always naked, and it's a good thing as much as the end of this 1978 movie.