NAKED AND VIOLENT (America...Cosi' Nuda, Cosi Violenta, 1970)

After Riz Ortolani scored a global hit and earned an Oscar nomination for "More," the theme song for the genre-defining Mondo Cane, it became a convention of the "mondo" genre of episodic, dyspeptic and salacious quasi-documentaries to have a sweepingly romantic theme song, ideally with English lyrics and optimally with music by Ortolani himself. Director Sergio Martino had to make due with the not-contemptible Bruno Nicolai, and in English this is what they came up with for Naked and Violent:

Look away...from misery,
From bitterness and hate,
And poverty...
And men who cannot wait
For you,
Anymore.

Look away, sweet Liberty,
From what you cannot see,
But Liberty,
You swore to set men free,
So why, tell me why,
Look away?

Probably no other national cinema has been so fascinated by the United States -- made so many films set there -- as Italy. America...cosi nuda, cosi violenta (America, how naked, how violent) is contemporary with spaghetti westerns and with mondo innovators Jacopetti and Prosperi's slavesploitation apocalypse Goodbye Uncle Tom, while later in the decade it was almost a ritual obligation for zombie and cannibal films to start in New York City. Martino's mondo purports to give audiences a warts-'n-all look at America, but it clearly caters -- panders, even -- to Italians' preconceived notions of our fascinating nation...as well as their desire for a realistic exploration of naked women. For every clip above there's an obviously and often absurdly staged sex scene. We get a Las Vegas sideshow where you get to see a girl strip and dance if you hit the target with the ball; an orgy in which the participants all wear fright masks and nothing else, inhibition being easier with anonymity; a purported recreation of a Manson Family ritual involving the devouring of fresh chicken blood with a side of melted wax on a naked woman's torso; and that mondo standby, painting on live, naked female canvasses.

Mondo movies have an obligation to offer pretentious moral or sociological commentary to legitimize their more sexploitative elements, and the sex scenes in Naked and Violent arguably advance the film's apparent thesis that Americans have grown so alienated from each other and from nature that they simply can't associate with one another in any normal, natural way. Americans seem to role-play in every aspect of their lives; both NFL football and drag racing are described as atavistic re-enactments of old-time rodeos (so what about modern-day rodeos?), while blacks, in a sequence possibly more racist than anything in the controversial Goodbye Uncle Tom, are shown reverting all the way to primitive Africa in a booga-booga dance and circumcision (?) rite of Martino's likely imagination. Some people are so incapable of forming relationships that they have to rely on sex dolls for company and comfort.Traditional kinship ties have deteriorated to the point that the elderly who can't afford to settle in admittedly paradisaical Florida communities are relegated to rot in wretched old-folks homes, or wander the Bowery, or stagger out to Times Square to sell their blood along with the other losers. Cancer is a blessing to the elderly poor because it means hospitalization: a warm bed and three squares a day.

But there's something unnatural even to the fortunate elderly, a reversion to childishness shared with the often naked and sometimes violent hippies who attended the big Altamont concert in 1969. Martino himself lurked at the fringes of Altamont but didn't have access to the real action on stage or nearby and had no rights to the music played there. Your first conclusive proof that Naked and Violent isn't going to be all it could be is when you hear its Altamont footage scored to that lousy Look Away song. You get the same effect, though it can't be helped, when Martino interviews various Americans; their words are drowned out almost immediately by an Italian translator. For an American viewer, it's hard to shake the impression that Martino and his writers weren't really interested in what Americans were saying or singing.

Mondo in a nutshell: this scene is supposed to show Americans' denial of death's reality with a corpse getting a makeup job at an undertaking parlor, but its most prominent feature is the trio of miniskirted assistants, filmed by Sergio Martino in the glamorous manner of a future giallo master.

Back when I reviewed Martino's All the Colors of the Dark I wrote that I was going to seek out more of the director's films. At first I had his giallos in mind, but then I found that Netflix was offering this rare mondo that had been brought to my attention months earlier by my frequent correspondent, the Vicar of VHS. As a mondo fan, I had to give it a shot. As a prospective Martino fan, I was disappointed. The quasi-documentary format doesn't exactly play to the man's stylistic strengths, and Naked and Violent (his third feature and his second mondo) is clearly a cheap project. Jacopetti and Prosperi's epics will make almost any other mondo look impoverished, but this one looks objectively impoverished. Moving down the mondo checklist, it boasts some of the most hopelessly obvious staged action (all of the sex scenes and, more offensively, an episode of white-on-black violence building up to a presumed lynching) and possibly the most revolting bit of animal cruelty in the whole genre. That comes when we see some cowboy gun-nuts taking target practice on helpless rabbits hung upside-down like midway targets. The cowboys, we're told, simply enjoy destroying life, and the moralizing tone of mondo narration never seemed more hypocritical. On the other hand, the scene sets up Martino's cleverest transition, as he cuts from exploded rabbits to the shimmying tail of a Playboy Bunny at a Chicago photo shoot.

The film finally finds some redemptive potential for America in its discovery of a little city built for the care of mentally handicapped children. The caregivers and their unselfconscious charges presumably exemplify the instinctive, unconditional bonds of affection the filmmakers failed to find elsewhere in the U.S. But Naked and Violent actually closes with a recitation of some purported blues poetry imploring the Statue of Liberty to "put out your light," "turn your back to the ocean" and "put a little love in me." This ties in (I guess) to the Look Away song, and I'm going to take another guess that it all means that Americans need to turn inward and deal with their hang-ups without taking them out on the rest of the world. A scene near the end of soldiers on leave embracing their wives in Hawaii helps make that point.

A mondo movie with the U.S. as its subject will always have some interest, just because of the novelty of presenting America as the exotic, decadent nation. Naked and Violent doesn't make the most of the premise's potential, but it'll retain historical interest for its conjuration of fact and fake into an America of the Italian imagination.

ONE DEADLY SUMMER (L'Ete Meurtrier, 1983)

If my selection of movies seems random to the point of incoherence, that's because I often don't know in advance what I'm going to watch in a given week. Blame that on the Albany Public Library, whose ever-growing selection of foreign films inspires many "What the hell is this? Let's take a look!" moments. One of the library's newest acquisitions is a film that won four Cesar awards, France's answer to the Oscars, including the Best Actress award to star Isabelle Adjani. It's the work of Jean Becker, a second-generation director whose work has been unknown to me. The box cover promises an erotic revenge story with some serious twists, and I've seen the film described as a prototype erotic thriller. I can see the point; set aside the rural French setting and the full frontal nudity and this could be the plot of a Lifetime Original Movie.

Adjani is Elaine, the 19 year old daughter (the actress was 28) of a crippled father and a German mother. They've just moved into the sort of small town where the dance hall has no air conditioning, where the nearest cinema is so far away that kids fall asleep on the trip back, and people will call a German woman "Eva Braun." Elaine is the typical seductive newcomer who insinuates her way into an unsuspecting family. In the typical Lifetime saga this character convinces everyone of her benevolence before her mask slips to revel Evil beneath. In One Deadly Summer there's hardly a mask because Elaine is clearly unstable from the beginning. There's a kind of belligerence to her seductiveness, as if she were asking an aroused populace, "Are you not seduced?" She flaunts her eminently flauntable body indiscriminately, and nearly everyone in sight is a potential erotic target. The situation is made all the more provocative because this backward burg is a place where there's not a lot of indoor plumbing. Elaine will drag her portable bathtub into her new family's kitchen to draw a bath, then strip naked and take a soak in full view of her future mother-in-law -- the one person who's outright hostile toward her. She is way too intimate, still inclined to nurse at her mother's breast in needy moments. She also has screaming fits in restaurants and has a savantish knack for adding large numbers together. And if that's not the mark of a lunatic I don't know what is.

When she seduces our hero Pin-Pon (a quaint nickname; he has a brother named Boubou), who narrates much of the story, you assume she has an ulterior motive for faking a pregnancy and so on, and so she does. She's really interested in the family's barrel organ, which it acquired back in 1955. The timing matters, because Elaine's mother was raped by a gang of movers who were transporting just such an instrument back in that year. That's how Elaine came to be (the film is set in 1976, which may have been when the source novel was written), and it has complicated her own family life ever since. Dad has never granted her his own family name despite his clear affection for her, and that almost guarantees that his affection could develop in the bad-touch direction. In fact, he happens to be crippled because he did get a little bad-touchy toward innocent glasses-wearing Elaine a few years back, only to have her answer his affection by cracking his skull with a shovel.

Strangely enough, you can see how this may have inspired her own predatory manner of seduction, which she's also applied to her female schoolteacher, a hapless woman who still carries a torch for her -- she gives Elaine a cigarette lighter for a wedding present with the inscription, "Let me be your flame." Our antiheroine proposes to seduce her way into the confidences of the two surviving rapists of 1955; the third, Pin-Pon's father, is already dead. Her father convinced her mother never to press charges against them, and Elaine's idea of making up to both of them is to track down these rapists, now small businessmen in their own rights, and destroy them.

Elaine's grandiose revenge plot doesn't quite work out. That's because she doesn't know the whole story of her mother's rape. The revelation of the truth is a shattering moment for her fragile psyche. Her entire life from a certain point has been dedicated to a certain purpose, and once that purpose is rendered irrelevant it's as if all those years never happened. We last see her regressed to the mental state of a nine-year old, after nine troubled days of marriage to poor Pin-Pon, whose noirish narration (e.g. "I was about to make the worst mistake of my life.") has not prepared us for a final tragic twist in the tale. Earlier, about to carry out her revenge plan, she'd left a message for him explaining everything -- as she then wrongly understood it. But he doesn't know that she's been proven wrong. In fact, he assumes that she's in that hopelessly regressed state because she failed in her purpose. So what does he owe his love if not revenge?...

As I've hinted by equating it with Lifetime movies, the story of L'Ete Meurtrier has to be told carefully to avoid coming out hopelessly camp. I'm not sure if Jean Becker fully succeeds in dodging all the pitfalls, but I don't know if any writer or director could. The story is so full of extremes that it can never be taken seriously by everyone. It doesn't seem like the kind of film that wins French awards, but it has one powerful thing going for it. Of course, that's Isabelle Adjani.

I wasn't confident in her at first. Yes, she was hot on sight, even before the clothes came off, but there was a vacuous quality in her early scenes that made her an unlikely ruthless avenger. But by her scene in the restaurant with Pin-Pon (a game effort by pop star Alain Souchon) she had sold me on Elaine's madness. She never turns into a calculating villain, and she never fully loses that vacuous quality, but what we see isn't stupidity but a real and alarming void where something more humane should be. If anything, Adjani comes on too strong, since Pin-Pon and his fellow villagers don't catch on to her lunacy until well after the audience has. But the story really needs her to go over the top, because hers is a kind of madness that spreads like a disease, something the film itself conveys by sharing the voiceover track among several narrators, some commenting in past tense, some expressing their thoughts in real time. This fractured narration keeps us questioning who knows what at any given point in the story. That's what separates One Deadly Summer from the TV movies that superficially resemble it. Those potboilers too quickly dismiss their antagonists as Evil outsiders whose removal can restore a benign normality, while Becker's film shows a woman whose madness was shaped by the world around her and will affect others after she leaves the scene.

One Deadly Summer is a film I can recommend both to arthouse enthusiasts and to fans of the wilder world of cinema. Adjani's performance is sure to impress both groups, perhaps for different reasons. As for the movie as a whole, I can only wonder which faction of fans will like it more....

There's no trailer available online, so the DVD distributor, BayViewEntertainment, has uploaded a short collection of clips to YouTube.

BLOOD SABBATH (1972)

All work and no play makes Samuel a dull boy, so I've taken a brief break from my current preoccupation with The Canon to look for something a bit more wild. It didn't take long to find that something. What I found was this trippy bit of hippie horror from a then-still-rare female director, and what kept me watching was an obvious directorial enthusiasm that transcended and nearly made a virtue of the film's budgetary limitations -- and a relentless tide of female nudity.

One detail that gives Blood Sabbath a bit of historical interest, for historians of trash pop culture, is the star turn by Tony Geary, later to be daytime television's most popular rapist. Here he's David, a young man with a guitar wandering the countryside. He's a classic American loner and isolato, so much an outsider that hippies pick on him. Does he want a beer, they ask him from their hippie van, only to spray the can in his face and flash boobs at him as they drive away.

Those damn hippies. A body can't sleep in the forest without them making noise with their wild parties and all that loud nudity. They won't even leave a man alone! Four naked women pounce upon the reposing David; his response is, basically: "What the hell? Ow! Leave me alone!" Now, many reviewers on IMDB have questioned why this young man should recoil so when presented with such a bounty, but I have to say that the critics are absolutely right. But we can't stop David from running away like it was Sadie Hawkins Day, tripping on a rock, and falling into a river. "Is he dead?" the hippie girls ask, but they lose interest before reaching a decision.

David (Tony Geary) fights his way free of a nubile wall of flesh in Blood Sabbath. Idiot.

David comes to on the riverbank and finds another woman, a clothed woman, bending over him. This he likes, whether because she's clothed or because there's just one of her. Indeed, he's smitten and wants her to keep him company. She'd like to, she says, but she can't stay, and into the water she goes. The next thing Dave knows, he's looking into the grizzled face of Lonzo, a local codger, who asks our hero where he's from. "I'm from Vietnam," David answers. So we know that he has issues. Indeed, these issues will manifest themselves a few times more later in the film. So he's a troubled Vietnam vet, but that's okay, because the clothed girl, Yyala, happens to be a water-nymph. So what we have shaping up here, in high-concept terms, is something like Jacob's Ladder meets Splash.

So she's a nymph. You could do worse. There are witches in the vicinity you see, and you know David wouldn't like them because those evil, attractive young women go about butt naked most of the time. But hanging with the nymph has its own complications.

Yyala: You are of the land, and I am of the sea. You have a soul, David, and I do not. I may not love anyone who has a soul.


David: I can't just give up my soul....Even if I wanted to get rid of my soul I wouldn't know how. But you must know a way!

Yyala: The danger is too great.

Dave's determination to be rid of his soul (you know, the better to love somebody) grows stronger with time, but advice is hard to come by. "Don't ask me about souls!" an irate Lonzo protests, "What do I know about souls?" "Well, who else can I ask?" David complains. Well, what makes him think Lonzo would know anything about the subject. Might it be that Lonzo annually collects a girl child from his village and leaves it up on the mountain for the witches to collect? And what has that to do with Dave's flashback to 'Nam, where he apparently killed a child?

As Blood Sabbath shows, one of the reasons the U.S. lost in Vietnam was because brave warriors like David often had to fight without any visible support. The war effort probably had hardly more budget than this movie did.

During a visit to the village festival, Dave plays a hunch and strikes up a conversation with the local Padre. "You know all about souls, don't you, and how to save them?" he inquires, "Would you know how to go about losing one?" The Padre (I capitalize it because this is all the name he gets in the movie) replies wisely, "Has the tequila gone to your head?" When David persists, the man of God has himself a little conniption fit, calling our hero a freak (well?) and driving him out of the cantina. Like he has a right to be righteous. It turns out that he has some sort of modus vivendi with Alotta, Queen of Witches. There's something about Dyanne Thorne, I guess, that makes a mere name inadequate. She needs a good epithet like "Queen of Witches" or "Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks." She has naked witches on call to entertain the Padre, but he's not in the mood tonight. "Are you resuming the BLOOD SACRIFICE!?" he challenges.

Alotta, Queen of Witches (Dyanne Thorne) knows how to treat guests, but one of the peculiarities of Blood Sabbath is the fact that no one, apparently, likes to be surrounded by horny, naked women.

You see, this sacrifice thing normally isn't as bad as it may have first sounded. As Lonzo finally explains it to David, he leaves the girl on the mountain, the witches pick her up, remove her soul, and raise her to be one of them. Where's the harm --but let's backtrack a moment. "Remove her soul?" Why, I think that's a little light bulb buzzing to life above our hero's head. Why couldn't he take the place of this year's little girl and get a free soul-ectomy. Then he and Yyala could be together forever and ever and ever and ever.

By normal standards, Dave, being a grown man and all, isn't exactly junior witch material. But Alotta (Q.O.W.) takes the offer anyway, though she doesn't care for the whole running-off-with-the-water-nymph idea. "Yyala is inconstant and short-loving," she warns, while I guess she or any of her subordinates would love him long time. Whatever. Dave will work out the contradictions later. For now, his mighty word is, "Yes, take my soul, damn you!"

It's time for a solemn ritual of the witches: the soul-ectomy. You can tell it's a serious occasion because the witches dress for the occasion in bikini bottoms. So clad, they warm things up with some sacred hoochie-koochie dancing before Alotta brings David to the altar. He is laid out, albeit with a discreet covering over the crotch, and the ladies love him up to the point where his double-exposure self (uncovered) up and leaves the room. From this point, David is "free," as he proves by romping around in the woods until the procession of witches, a bit more clad this time, catches up with him. Now we're really serious, for this is the BLOOD SACRIFICE that the Padre fretted about. It's the turn of one of the witches to be laid out on the altar, but there's no loving up for her (and the lack of witch-on-witch action is a grave omission from this film; the closest we get is another witch straddling the victim on the altar and screaming); only a dagger in the throat. Blood fills a ceremonial goblet for Dave to drink from. Feeling quite soulless now, he dashes off to Yyala. Soulless herself, she is nevertheless quite repulsed by the sight of Dave's bloodstained mouth, and just like any bourgeois square water-nymph she runs away in terror.

Once again our hero needs advice. He turns to Alotta this time, and her advice is that he should kill her enemy the Padre and bring the man's head to her. Then Yyala will be his! This request seems odd because earlier we had seen Alotta cursing the Padre and stabbing at a Padre voodoo doll. For all we knew that had accomplished something, but apparently not. He's in his bedroom staring into space as Dave arrives, and the next thing we know Alotta is the proud owner of a fresh head.

"I knew him, Lonzo, a fellow of...Actually, his jest was pretty damn finite."

Things get just a little complicated from this point. For starters, Dave is in a seriously deranged state in which he can't tell Yyala and Alotta apart. In addition, Lonzo finds out about the head and chastises Alotta about it, only to be told by her that Yyala killed the Padre. Alotta wouldn't lie, of course, so the wrathful Lonzo heads out to kill her. Fortunately, Dave intervenes, and Lonzo turns his pointed attentions his way. Fortunately for Dave, Yyala intervenes and stabs Lonzo in the back. For two soulless people our lovers are rather remorseful about this. Yyala in particular bawls over the deed, while David has another flashback.

At a certain point, there's nothing for a flashback-riddled vet to do but kill the villain. But he can't do it without Alotta getting off a final curse; "I call upon your own people to come and kill you!" At which point comes one final flashback in which Soldier Dave radios HQ to tell them that their planes are bombing "your own people." I foolishly had the idea that we were going to get some kind of Nam zombie climax, but by "your own people" the Queen of Witches meant that the instrument of her revenge would be that van full of hippies from the start of the picture. But will her revenge really be that bad for Dave?...

Brianne Murphy, the director of Blood Sabbath, helmed only one other film, spending most of her career as a cinematographer for television. The other film, To Die, To Sleep, was made 22 years later and sounds about as opposite to Blood Sabbath as you can get, but I guess a lot of people grew out of that period in their lives. Still, on the strength of this movie the fact that Murphy didn't work more in the Seventies is regrettable. She knew how to keep a cheap film looking busy with frantic activity and regular outbursts of mass female nudity. As the story gets nuttier, she rose to the occasion in portraying David's delirium. For this she had Tony Geary to thank for bringing the enthusiasm of youth to his role. Like many of the actors, he tends to shout his lines, but this is the sort of film that needs to be hysterical, so there was no point holding him back. Had he more craft at this point in his career, the film would probably have been less entertaining. The only performer who really drops the ball in this regard is Susan Damante, making her movie debut as Yyala. It didn't exactly shock me to learn that she went on to star in the Wilderness Family movies, since those sound better suited to her. For an exotic creature, she was much too mundane, though according to the film's odd logic that seemed to be what attracted David to her. I suppose your traditional woodland sprites or pixies really couldn't compete with hippies for pure exoticism in those days. It's ironic that we regard hippies themselves today as little more than simple woodland creatures. Actually, that makes the combination of hippies and nymphs and witches a better fit than it may have seemed at the time.

I can't really comment on the cinematography because I saw a crappy print, but where this film really punches above its weight is on the musical side. IMDB informs me that the "BAX" to whom the score is credited is none other than Les Baxter of AIP fame, and he nails the notes to match the stark yet wacky imagery throughout the film, from hippie ballads to psycho-syntho trip music. I'd almost say that the film is more worth a listen than a viewing, except that the lavish nudity, quasi-supernatural violence and over-the-top acting, at the very least, makes it very watchable for citizens of the wild world of cinema.

Blood Sabbath can be viewed online on membership sites like Movieflix or Veoh, and can probably be found pretty cheaply otherwise. The only clip I could find on YouTube is dubbed into Spanish, so my poor captures will have to suffice as hints of the naked weirdness on display in this charmingly twisted little film.

TV Diary: CHAINED HEAT (1983)

While channel surfing randomly last night I stumbled upon the beginning of CHAINED HEAT on one of the Showtime channels. It was commercial-free, of course, and helpfully letterboxed.

Here's how the movie advertised itself in 1983. When you're done with the trailer, I'll tell you whether Chained Heat delivered on its promises.




Paul Nicolas's film is said to have revitalized the women-in-prison genre for the 1980s. Personally, I see hardly anything vital about Chained Heat. Linda Blair, whose nudity was presumably a major selling point for somebody, is Carol Henderson. "I killed a man with my car," she explains on her way to her first-ever stint in stir. As you might expect, prison is where the criminals are. Warden Bacman (John "Dean Wormer" Vernon) has a jacuzzi in his office and videotapes himself romping with nude prisoners. He also runs the prison drug racket, except that someone's horning in on his action. Those someones, in fact, are Capt. Taylor (Stella Stevens), the head prison guard, and Lester (Henry Silva), who lurks around the prison infirmary, cheats on Taylor with blonde prison gang leader Ericka (Sybil Danning), and smuggles girls out of prison as entertainment for decadent parties at nearby mansions. Ericka is waging a race war with Duchess (Tamara Dobson), the leader of the black prisoners. She seems to be sexually omnivorous, as she comes on to innocent Carol in the communal shower, advising the "prison virgin" that she'll need a friend to protect her in the cuthroat environment.

You'll notice that our main character is almost peripheral to the main storylines. For half the film, Carol is mainly a passive spectator of the proceedings. Scared after her encounter with Ericka, she visits the warden, who recruits her as a stoolie in his quest to find out who's smuggling dope into prison. After a disastrous night as one of Lester's party girls, she finds one of Ericka's minions murdered by Duchess's gang. She runs to the warden and inadvertently betrays Lester's racket. This starts the dominoes falling. Fearing exposure of her ties to Lester, Capt. Taylor has one of her guards drown the warden in his jacuzzi and kill Val, Carol's best prison pal, whom he'd been filming ("Don't call me Warden, call me Fellini!" he says). Once Carol knows the score, she launches a slo-mo attack on Boots, the murderous guard, only to get dumped in solitary for her trouble. Taylor decides to eliminate her rival, Ericka, by framing her for Val's death. Now Carol rallies all the convict factions to unite against Taylor, sparking a riot, an interracial alliance of former enemies, and a fatal showdown with the villain on the prison roof.

And all of it amounts to little more than an inert mass. That's a fair description of Linda Blair herself. I'd heard that she was a bad actor as an adult, but here is proof. The only kind of emoting she can manage is crying. Otherwise she hardly even tries -- and she isn't much to look at either. Nor is anyone, really. Danning and Dobson strike me as past their prime, and all the women have that early-MTV look: big hair and fashions that exemplify '80s bad taste.

With few exceptions, the cast is guilty of the irredeemable sin of bad cinema: they don't even try to entertain us. Not that you can blame them. Nicolas's script, written with Aaron Butler, is basically a camped-up collection of cliches thrown together with no conviction. As a director, Nicolas is equally uninspired. The climactic riot put me in mind of those women's club wartime re-enactments you would see on Monty Python's Flying Circus. Worse, the director seems to chicken out when it comes to violence. Showtime may have run an edited print, since I note different run times in different countries, because their broadcast, at least, cuts away anytime anything especially brutal is going to happen. As far as I know, however, they kept all the nudity in. But even those bits have a by-the-book quality to them. Everything about Chained Heat seems derivative. Nothing about it has the visceral quality of Sweet Sister, which is just as dumb a film in its own way. It's really the worst kind of exploitation movie; the sort in which the filmmakers feel they don't have to do anything but go through the motions once they've got you in the theater.

With such a film, it's up to the actors to save it. Of the cast, only Stella Stevens really seems to take it seriously. For all that she supposedly lusts after Henry Silva, she actually looks the butchiest of the main actresses, though that angle isn't really played up. But Stevens takes it too seriously and really just plods through her role. Silva doesn't take it seriously at all, but at least seems to be having a good time. John Vernon really seems to be having a good time in the most over-the-top role. At the very least you envy him cavorting with the girls in the jacuzzi. If anything, however, his presence undercuts the film and makes it seem like National Lampoon's Women in Prison. This doesn't happen automatically when Vernon's in a movie -- The Outlaw Josey Wales will teach you otherwise, but when a film like Chained Heat is already kinda campy, Vernon can easily exacerbate that condition.

To meet my standards, for what they're worth, an exploitation or grindhouse movie has got to go for it in a way that I felt Chained Heat did not. I saw nothing in it that I didn't think I'd seen before and done better -- and I haven't seen that many women-in-prison films. But what I saw as obnoxious campiness others might see as knowing self-parody, and Chained Heat may be funny enough in its fashion to amuse viewers of different tastes. It's not the business of a blog like this to tell anyone not to see a movie, but I will tell you that I didn't like it.

SWEET SUGAR (1972)

For many of the first action heroines of the 1970s, the rite of passage was a "women in prison" movie. This little genre dates back a long way, but in the great grindhouse decade variations on the theme developed. The great innovation came with Jack Hill's The Big Doll House (1971), which introduced more exotic settings (the Philippines in the first case) along with more nudity and violence and transformed the conventional prison setting into something more like a work camp -- think of the template as something like a distaff Cool Hand Luke. Hill and his stars Pam Grier and Sid Haig followed up on that first film's success pretty quickly with The Big Bird Cage, but imitators were hot on the trail.

One of the early imitators, from 1972, is Michael Levesque's Sweet Sugar. I saw it on Movieflix in a not-so-great transfer from a tape which has the alternate title Captive Women III. Levesque went on to do some art direction and production design work for Russ Meyer and one of the Ilsa movies, but didn't direct another film after this until 1999. That's too bad, because Sweet Sugar has a crazy badness to it that should have had more opportunities for expression in that fertile era.

Phyllis Davis, who rarely escaped from television after this, is our comely heroine. She's framed by an unnamed Central American police force into signing an agreement to work off her sentence cutting sugar cane. The Costa Rican locations look appropriately grungy and give the movie the right sense of environment, especially when the filmmakers practically burn a forest down at the end. You get your brutal wardens, along with one nice won for potential romance and two more relatively benign ones for comedy relief, and you get your standard token Pam Grier clone for an attitude contest with Sugar. But this film's piece de resistance is the real power in the camp, Dr. John, a scientist experimenting with native herbs in attempts to revert animals to their primal savage state. The late Angus Duncan plays this part as what probably proves the role of a lifetime. Dr. John is a sadist and a vivisectionist. He also acquires a habit late in the film, after being bonked on the head, of talking about himself in the third person formal -- but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

This is exploitation cinema, so you hope for something outrageous to make this picture stand out. Dr. John delivers. While his most extreme outrage is ordering Mojo, a black male prisoner who claims voodoo powers, burned at the stake and served as dinner to the female prisoners, another of his exploits is available for you to sample courtesy of YouTube, and this may prove more outrageous than the burning business for some people. It is torture by feral cat flinging.






Rest assured, animal-lovers: Dr. John gets his comeuppance, but not before a spectacular breakout scene, during which he initially stumbles about stupefied from his blow to the head, acting all too calm and passive, only to snarl back to villainous life as he orders his guards to gun down the escapees. Held hostage by Ella Edwards (the token) as they race a jeep through a hail of bullets, Dr. John seems ecstatic. "Dr. John is invulnerable!" he exults shortly before his driver is shot and the jeep hits a wall. He's unhurt, but unwisely taunts the fatally wounded Simone. "You're going to die," he says, "but Dr. John is immortal!" To which Simone responds, "Screw that, muthaf***er!" emptying her machine gun into him and blowing up the jeep while Sugar, a blonde prisoner, and the two comedy guards make good their escape. As a climax, it's not quite up there with the prisoners devouring Wanda (aka Ilsa) the Wicked Warden, but it's a perfectly satisfactory grindhouse experience.





At least one prison-film aficionado holds Sweet Sugar in fairly low regard, but if you think I've given it too much space, check out this review. In the end, though, the writer recognizes the movie for what it is: an exercise in exploitation that largely delivers what it promises. As a rule, I like performers who go out on a limb, so Angus Duncan earns this film a recommendation for grindhouse connoisseurs. Also, the women are pretty to look at, Ms. Davis the star especially, and especially during shower and skinny dipping scenes. The Psychotronic Video Guide considers it "one of the best women-in-a-tropical prison movies," but I'll reserve judgment until I see more in the genre. Overall, this is the sort of movie where you ought to laugh at the violence. Approach it in that spirit, or with spirits, or at least with like-minded friends, and you could do worse with 90 minutes.