Scrubbers

1984 "IT'S A CRIME WHAT PRISON CAN DO TO A GIRL!"
5.6| 1h30m| R| en
Details

Inmates fight, pair off, try suicide and attempt escape at a British reform school for girls.

AD
AD

Watch Free for 30 Days

All Prime Video Movies and TV Shows. Cancel anytime. Watch Now

Trailers & Clips

Also starring Debby Bishop

Also starring Eva Mottley

Reviews

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.
Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.
Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.
videorama-759-859391 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.
bletcherstonerson 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.
Theo Robertson As everyone seems to have noted SCRUBBERS seems to be nothing more than SCUM made for a female audience . The structures are very similar ( Hardly surprising since SCUM author Roy Minton co-wrote this ) with a relatively thread bare plot getting in the road of episodic incidents . Even the fact that we see British TV stars like Robbie Coltrane ( More or less unrecognisable in a small role ) , Kathy Burke ( As Waynetta Slob ! )and Pat Wicks from EASTENDERS ( Before she met Frank Butcher ) make comparisions with SCUM inevitable But when all is said and done this a very poor follow up to SCUM mainly because of three reasons 1 ) The poor acting . Despite being a low budget movie the cast of SCUM at least played their parts with intensity especially Ray Winstone . There`s no such acting tour de force here and if memory serves me right much of the acting is plain awful 2 ) There`s no real stand out scene as in SCUM that people discuss like the scene in the greenhouse . There are slightly sickening scenes like the puppet show but they`re unconvincing and seem written in to shock a blase audience . Mind you could say the same with the greenhouse scene in scum so I don`t know if it`s a valid criticism 3 ) What is a valid criticism is that there`s no great lines to qoute in SCRUBBERS . Try discussing SCUM without saying " Where`s yer tool ? " or " I`m the daddy now " or " You want f***in` stripping ? " A needless and inferior follow up to SCUM probably made to cash in on the success of the 1979 film which became a massive hit on video round about the same time
rosscinema This is a film from the much respected Mai Zetterling and to be honest its clearly not one of her better efforts. We have all seen girls in prison/reform school type of films before and while the gritty atmosphere of the film is effective its still very familiar and bleak. I would have appreciated more of an effort to understand these girls instead of just having the characters put in situations and then watching them react. We know very little or nothing at all about most of these girls. I was interested in the two characters Carol and Eddie and I wish they had a script with a little more sharper vision to it. There is one scene that shows two girls fighting and it was in slow motion. Why is that one and only scene in slow motion? No reason for it. It looked very badly staged. English viewers will recognize a lot of the actress's in the film while Americans will probably only recognize Robbie Coltrane in an early effort. Film just didn't have an original angle in the way it was presented. To bad, some really talented people were involved in this production.