Powerful

Absolutely Fantastic

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

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.

The lesbian Carol Howden (Amanda York) and the troublemaker Annetta Brady (Chrissie Cotterill) escape from a reformatory for different reasons: Carol wants be arrested again and to go to Borstal, where her girlfriend is imprisoned, and Anneta wants to see her daughter in a foster house. They both are sent to Borstal, a prison for young women, where the whole story takes place. Annetta blames Carol for their new arresting. This English movie has a good performance of the cast. However, the characters are so badly developed that we, viewers, do not know the reasons and the motives why the women are confined in such a place. Their accents are horrible and the story has nothing different or special comparing with other movies of this theme. Watchable and forgettable. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): 'Aonde Nasce o Crime' ('Where The Crime is Born')

Outstanding English-language effort by the great Swedish actor/director Mai Zetterling (anyone who have seen her brilliant Night Games will agree she kicks Bergman's sorry ass!).Although the video box art tried to sell it off as a cheap Women-In-Prison-exploitation flick, it is really serious stuff. As other commentators have pointed out the film share a lot of similarity with Alan Clarke's grim masterpiece Scum, even sharing the same screenwriter. The main difference is that Scrubbers takes place in an all-women juvenile prison, making it both a great complement to Clarke's film and an interesting study of the differences of the sexes in the patriarchal society. Didn't sound that interesting, did it? Well, it really is when you think about it! For instance, how do the girls behavior to one another differ from the boys? How do girls backgrounds, views of themselves and reason for inprisonment differ? What issues do the girls from Scrubbers lack, that the boys from Scum has to deal with, and vice versa. It's really interesting. The film is well-acted, well-scripted, thought-provoking and unpleasant. A must-see if you like your movies hard and unembellished. 8/10NOTE FOR NON-ENGLISH VIEWERS: I saw a non-subtitled copy Scrubbers, and although this usually is no problem for me, in this case I had some trouble understanding parts of the dialouge. My American-born girlfriend had the same problem. Unless you've majored in ugly working-class English, local swearwords or prison-jive I would advise to see a subtitled version.

I saw this film on cable recently and remembered how bad it was the first time I saw it.The story is about female delinquents locked up in an English borstal in the early eighties.This film blatantly 'borrows' from the film Scum with Ray Winstone and I mean blatant - there's the cut-wrist suicide from one of the more unstable inmates, the hard-nut - Eddie (who replaces Scum's Ray Winstone), and the scene where an attack is made in a deserted part of the compound with a steel bar - Scrubbers version features a slow-motion sequence which is obviously faked!The only reasons for watching this garbage is to see early roles from Kathy 'I'm smoking a fag!' Burke from the 'Harry Enfield Show', Robbie Coltrane and 'Pat' from 'Eastenders'. As well as many a naked pair of breasts - which make the movie watchable - just.Verdict - One for the lads.Oi Oi savaloy!