Star Slammer

Star Slammer: The Escape

a.k.a. Prison Ship

United States - 1988

Director - Fred Olen Ray

Vidmark Entertainment, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 26 minutes

Reform School Girl (1994)

Reform School Girl

United States - 1994

Director - Jonathan Kaplan

Before watching, I read the synopsis of this film that were provided  at a number of websites, but was still surprised to discover that it is actually a remake of the 1957 film of the same name. Of course I should in the common, less stigmatizing parlance of the day more properly call it a "re-boot." None of the descriptions were entirely accurate to the film at hand, but neither is it really a re-make.

The early scenes right up to Donna's Incarceration are a close recreation of the original film including the opener featuring the lecherous uncle (watching the original film on television no less!) who assaults Donna (Aimee Graham) and gets beaten up by her "friends," including a sleazy Matt LeBlanc just short of his Friends career who commits the requisite vehicular homicide that lands Donna in reform school.

In 1957, Donna found herself increasingly fighting for survival against her fellow students, with the teachers and friendly, pipe-smoking school psychiatrist doing their benificent best to save the girls from themselves and unattached directionless independence. In the end of course, the vulnerable Donna, one of the lucky ones to be sure, passes from the compassionate embrace of the penal institution safely into the hands of her lifelong male guardian and everyone lives happily ever after.

In the subsequent 35 years since that film however, the 50's era benevolence of established institutions like medicine and domesticity  has vanished. Instead we have a conflict that is as much the opposite as it is a rejection of the central argument. Here it is the school itself, complete with a lecherous psychiatrist (oh how times have changed!) from which Donna must be saved. And instead of finding refuge in the shadow of a man, Donna takes her fate in her own hands, effectively protecting herself, and eventually her little sister as well. True, much has been made of the lesbian relationship that takes place between Donna and a fellow inmate, but while this is technically the opposite of the original in which she fears and fights with her peers, it is very nearly forgotten by the end of the film. I was tempted to suggest that the whole thing was exploited primarily for the hetero-male-fantasy, which is undoubtedly there, but coupled with a number of other telling choices,  I'm willing to give it some credit for rocking the boat.

I went into this expecting something much grimier and much lower quality than I got. While it wasn't exactly the apogee of dramatic entertainment, neither was it disappointing. What it lacks in stylistic flair (a great deal) it makes up for in refreshing sense of independence, both ideologically and from the very generic narrative cycle that bore it.

If you're curious to see it yourself and compare it to the original, this one is currently streaming on NutFlex and there's a link to the other included with my review.

Reform School Girls

Reform School Girls

United States - 1986

Director - Tom DeSimone

New World Video, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 34 minutes

You'll have to get you ass over to Paracinema if you wanna read my review of this puzzlingly popular 80's cult-favorite. If you're too lazy to read, I'm not sure what you're doing here, but I'll give you some posters as a consolation prize.

These posters are on loan from the fantastic Wrong Side of the Art

Reform School Girl

Reform School Girl

United States - 1957

Director - Edward Bernds

This snappy little poster does a wonderful job of making an otherwise tame film appear incredibly exciting. They sure don't make 'em like this anymore. With over fifty years of retrospect it's easy to call this movie tame; by today's standards nothing in Reform School Girl is shocking in fact, much of its tension seems downright silly, its claims simply naive, but in 1957 well, things were a little different than they are now. But, while the shocking moments might plausibly have mellowed with the social changes of the last half century, the overall scope of the film, that is good girls gone bad, seems not to have lost it's appeal. What remains interesting are the circumstances of the protagonist(a)s fall from grace and, her subsequent redemption.

Thanks to Lewis Wayne Gallery for the lobby cards.

And her redemption is essential to films of this era (and still to a lesser extent) because in the end, the starlet must be made appealing to the audience once again. I would venture that there are not too many movies before the 70's that started to feature irredeemable protagonistas. It's always titilating to see how low she can go, but ideologically we prefer the pure girl after all. In Reform School Girl, Donna (New Mexico native Gloria Castillo) is the product of a broken home where her harpy aunt and lecherous uncle each abuse her in their own way. Seeking escape she goes out with some kindof-friends only to be harangued and abused again by her rotten 'date.' When he runs a man over and the two are caught, Donna is sent to a rural Reform School where she soon finds herself fighting for survival with the other girls. Finally, a local farm boy sneaks onto the school grounds and slow dances the warmth back into Donna's heart. The End (more or less.)

So, while the love of a good man proves once again to be the saving grace of the lost woman, Reform School Girl still offers some interesting tributaries into the river of tradition. The fact that Donna's home life, and the rotten boy who gets her into trouble are clearly centered in the city suggests that the new (in '57) urban way of life is responsible for the erosion of traditional family structures. Note that Donna is saved by a rural boy whose greatest transgression (by his admission) was the borrowing of a tractor without asking. Compound this with the fact that her uncle, clad in dungarees and an undershirt ('wifebeater') idles at home ogling Donna while aunt Rita comes home and goes out again wearing a handkerchief on her head, hinting that she is the one earning a living. The working class way of life and the eroding of traditional gender roles are, if not equally at fault, at least complicit in the urban industrial decay of ideal feminine purity.

If Reform School Girl's conservative solution is less than surprising, it does at least highlight the abusive nature of objectification. In the opening scenes, shots of Donna's uncle watching in the mirror as she puts her clothes on are cross-cut with shots of the rotten boy dressing in front of a mirror surrounded by pin-up-girl posters and Donna spends a good deal of the movie voicing her subsequent distrust of men. And for a movie, and a genre marketed to a predominantly male audience that sort of critique -however obtuse- can't be a bad thing.

 The two posters come thanks to MovieGoods.

Thanks to Psychotronic 16 for making this movie available for us to watch. It's worth the hour and ten minutes it takes up and boy does the time fly!

Carcel de Mujeres

Carcel de Mujeres

(Women's Prison)

Mexico - 1951

Director - Miguel M. Delgado

Bamboo House of Dolls

Bamboo House of Dolls

Hong Kong - 1973

Director - Chih-Hung Kuei

This poster has an obviously striking and rather blunt subject, but I think it's funny that despite the fact that this takes place entirely in Asia, the prison guard is dressed as a Nazi. (The pistol however is a Japanese model, the "Nambu")

From Movie Poster Shop

 

From Moviegoods

Both of the last two come from the magnificent Ultra Guro

Girls In Prison

Girls In Prison

United States – 1994

Director – John McNaughton

Dimension Home Video, 1995, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 22 minutes

The term “guilty pleasure” is confusing and somewhat self defeating. Film historian and social critic Robin Wood points out (in a brutal critique of that jawless cancerous mongoloid Roger Ebert) that if one feels guilty at pleasure, you’re bound to renounce either one or the other. The term’s use suggests that the “guilty” viewer really sees themselves as slumming, and has to reify their refined tastes by pointing out their “guilty” feelings at watching what they "really consider" to be such base garbage.

Here at Lost Video Archive though, we don’t make excuses for taste, and Women In Prison films are a case in point. I hate to let things get too serious in this damp corridor without a little levity, and what with all the social commentary around here lately it seems high time to lighten things up a bit. So here it is, about as close as it comes to “guilty pleasure” in my book; Girls In Prison. Let’s not kid ourselves, has there ever been a WIP film that has a serious plot? I mean, one to which the nudity and catfights are incidental rather than fundamental? (One exception is 1943’s head-swimmingly boring and nudity-free House of 1000 Women which is about Englishwomen imprisoned in Germany during the Second World War {I have not seen Ida Lupino in 1955’s Women’s Prison but I'll bet that it is similar}) It’s already suspect to walk into a video rental place and pick up a WIP film (and this is where I think guilt is confused with embarrassment in the above statement), but to pick one that has such a well known name on the cover is to walk willingly into the disparaging gaze of society.

Anne Heche became a well known actress when she starred in several films with Johnny Depp and Demi Moore around 1996. But particularly after her well publicized psychological issues and relationship debacle in 2000, this early film became something of a dirty little (not so) secret. The sort of early career choice we all assume that actresses regret once they're established. Ironically of course, Girls In Prison is one of the more clever WIP films out there, and despite its low production value and shoddy, self-aware comedy, has an interesting premise set in the midst of the McCarthyism/Red-Scare of the early 1950’s. If hard pressed, one could probably come up with at least a partially redeeming excuse for watching any other WIP flick, but considering the names involved here, it is impossible to credibly justify watching Girls In Prison to anyone, except to see Anne Heche’s (and maybe Ione Skye's) boobs, no matter how "innocent" you might actually be.

Cellblock Sisters

Cellblock Sisters

United States – 1995

Director – Henri Charr

PM Entertainment Group, 1995, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 35 minutes

Instead of simply placing an innocent girl in corrupting circumstances to see what happens, Cellblock Sisters takes two effectively identical girls, and proposes an answer to the age old question of nature vs. nurture. By taking two sisters separated by a year or so in age, and subjecting them to different upbringings this mocie asserts that it is strictly environ mental factors that turn a woman into a beast. In posing this question however, there is an unspoken assumption of what a woman should be.

While still infants, sisters April and May are sold off by their mother’s drunken biker boyfriend Sam. Their mother, a hillbilly junkie with a terrible fake southern accent agrees at first, thinking the girls are only going to a home until she can clean herself up. Well after the girls are gone, she realizes what has happened and attacks Sam who “accidentally” kills her. Over the next sixteen years, each girl is raised in a completely different environment by their foster parents. May has been living in England, a place normatively associated with propriety and a particularly ordered domesticity. As such, she is quickly identified as the protagonist because she has idealized feminine qualities: the innocence, virginity and most importantly the potential. She is as yet unspoiled and thus her future unwritten.

Her sister April on the other hand has spent the intervening years in Los Angeles, the iconic lawless border town in the tradition of the U.S. western. It is the quintessential metropolitan metaphor for vice and corruption. During her upbringing it is insinuated that her foster father sexually abused her. Eventually, years later after killing him, she continued a life of violent crime and now pushing a whopping 18 or19 years old, is the leader of a gang of cheap biker thugs. Because she was irredeemably “tainted” as a child, we know that she can have no future to speak of. We rejoin the sisters just as May, wearing a white skirt and jacket, arrives in Los Angeles to see her long lost sister for the first time.

It is here that May finds herself spiraling into corruption almost as soon as she meets her sister. One of their fist moments together is at the gang’s party shack where April presents May with a black leather jacket, “my leather jacket, now it’s yours.” Thus May’s innocence is symbolically tarnished by association with her sister’s tough and dark character. The corruption continues when April takes May to murder Sam, the father who sold them in the film’s opening minutes. April flees the scene of the crime, but May, tormented by the need to know where Sam buried their mother, stays behind with him as he dies and is subsequently sent to prison for his murder.

Born Innocent

In collaboration with a selection of the finest film blogs the infranet has to offer Lost Video Archive is proud to contribute this quality post to Blair Week, a six day extravaganza expounding on the virtues of Linda Blair and her legacy of quality motion pictures. Don't believe me? Just read on...

Who would cut an innocent cover insert?

Born Innocent

United States - 1974

Director - Donald Wrye

Program Hunters Incorporated, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 32 minutes

Born Innocent is technically a women-in-prison film, but I say "technically" with a heavy dose of seriousness because it is not the kind of exploitation you expect from that subgenre. Born Innocent plays on the fears parents have of maladjusted or "different" daughters falling in with the wrong crowd or lashing out, and being sent to juvenile detention. Particularly because it was made for television, Born Innocent carries an air of fearmongering that defies any attempt to really "have fun" watching it. In a way though it prefaces Chained Heat by throwing innocent Linda into lock-down with a bunch of savage girls. She quickly learns what real rebellion means by getting her ass handed to her. But don't expect your typical women-in-prison antics here, not even the shower scenes have any "redeeming" qualities.

Director Wrye is definitely an advocate of traditionalism, having directed a number of films glorifying the rugged individual character of American myth. He seems particularly concerned with the effects of post-industrial society on the archetype of the American Family and the dream promised by postwar prosperity, especially as it relates to the expected roles for men. In a number of his films including The Man Who Could Talk to Kids, Divorce Wars, The Face of Rage and Heart of Steel among others, he looks at the ways in which the norms of masculinity and the father/husband figure fall short of mythic expectation.

Born Innocent (right down to the title) follows in this trend. Chris (Blair) has an abusive paranoid father and a cowed and vacant mother (Kim Hunter aka Dr. Zira!). After running away several times Chris ends up in a reform school for girls who, like herself are largely the product of broken or damaged families. While there, Chris in particular, but all the girls become the damaged goods we all expect to come out of a "correctional facility".

Of course, this operates on the unspoken assumption that women need to be protected, and it is men's role to do the protecting. What Born Innocent suggests is that if the role of the father/husband as guardian and provider of the family is undermined, the innocence of girls, and women is imperiled. If Chris's father can't act as her masculine protector ostensibly because his status outside the family is challenged, this will lead her to fall into corruption and impurity.It's a complicated story, but it is of course exactly what happens.

The controversy that surrounded this TV-film when it was originally broadcast in September of 1974 was largely due to the scene in which Chris is raped by the other girls. The scene was removed from later broadcasts and didn't reappear until home video. Allegedly the film inspired a real rape committed on a little girl by several other girls. The victim's family sued NBC and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Call me crazy, but I think it was the fact that it was women performing the act rather than men that was so abhorrent to the public. If it had been men, nobody would have blinked, because that's expected. Nobody sued the network because her dad knocked Chris and her mother around, they didn't need "inspiration".
Upset the normative gender status-quo and people get all riled up.
I'm just sayin'.

As far as I can tell author Creighton Brown Burnham hasn't written a damn thing else. This however is the novelization of the made for TV movie written by Bernhardt J. Hurwood.

All these rad sites have contributed great posts to Blair Week, go check 'em out:
Satan's Hope Chest - Chained Heat and Savage Island
Camp Movie Camp - Grotesque and Nightforce
The Horror Section - Hell Night
Full Moon Reviews - Bailout
Illogical Contraption gets Repossessed
Lines That Makes Things drops original Linda inspired artwork
Breakfast In the Ruins - Exorcist II
B Movies and Beyond - Summer of Fear
The Manchester Morgue - Rollerboogie
Happy Otter - The Chilling
Ninja Dixon - The Witchery
Unflinching Eye - Linda's fall from grace.
Lost Video Archive - Savage Streets and Born Innocent

Savage Streets

In collaboration with a selection of the finest film blogs the infranet has to offer Lost Video Archive is proud to contribute this quality post to Blair Week, a six day extravaganza expounding on the virtues of Linda Blair and her legacy of quality motion pictures. Don't believe me? Just read on...

Savage Streets

United States 1984

Director - Danny Steinman

Vestron Video, 1985, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 33 minutes

Somewhere along the way I became a Linda Blair junkie. I think this is a fairly common weakness, but because it is frequently predicated on a rather shallow but unsurprising appreciation for cheap nudity it’s not something readily admitted. I’m pretty sure it happened when I was about 13 and my friend’s older brother loaned us his Night Patrol video. It’s a movie loaded with crass low-quality humor that I didn’t quite get at the time, but I did understand tits, and Night Patrol has a healthy share of those. I was also old enough to understand that a great deal of the films tension rested upon the protagonists desire to get in Linda’s pants, which to everyone’s great delight happens at the end. By that time I was already sold down the river.

Linda didn’t turn out to be such a great actress, but that revelation came at a time when there was plenty of work available that didn’t require much acting per-se. The childlike behavior and almost unnatural innocence she brought to The Exorcist, turned out to be  an asset in her career as an adult. Linda came of age at the exact moment that American exploitation film was at its peak, and Savage Streets is premium example.

Made the same year as Night Patrol, Savage Streets claims right there on the back cover to invoke yet another Linda vehicle, the previous year’s epic Chained Heat. Initially this claim is confusing because plotwise, Savage Streets actually appears to be an example of that brand of juvenile dystopia films particular to the 1980’s. Typically these featured hyperbolic warring punk-cum-new-wave street gangs who combined Bowiesque face paint and teased hair with studded leather and switchblades. They were the heirs to the delinquent youth scare films of the 50’s but they tried to fuse the modern mosaic of pop cultures into a hyperbolic but plausibly threatening future. Punk, rap, and metal among other subcultural in-groups were all equally threatening attacks on the status quo and contemporary exploitation films often combined them all into one militaristic drug soaked nightmare in films like my personal favorite, Death Wish 3. Savage Streets is rife with the childish arrogance that made parents of the 80’s shudder for thought of a future ruled by their own coke addled offspring. The best part of all this of course, is that scare films usually end up becoming popular with the generation they portray.

In Savage Streets Linda is the leader of one such group of unruly high-school girls whose smoking-in-class contempt for such elders as school principal John Vernon sends shivers up the spine. Such virulent threats to the status quo however are couched within the safety of other standard distractions. The rest of the high-school landscape is a choice mix of comedic flirtations and shirt-ripping shower cat-fights, a veritable teen-women-in-prison-comedy that just proves youth rebellion of the future is, if nothing else, still predictable. When her deaf sister (Linnea Quigley) is brutally raped and her best friend killed by another more violently unhinged gang reminiscent of a watered-down Warriors, Linda perms her hair and goes full vigilante, invoking Jenifer Hills and Paul Kersey all in one pouty-lipped self-aware package.

It should be pretty clear at this point that Savage Streets is much more than just a delinquent youth movie. That may be an overarching theme, but within it are mixed other distinct sub-genres of exploitation. I realize that describing the film in terms of its resemblance to other genre standards makes it sound like an incomplete copy of them all. But the awesome thing about Savage Streets is that it doesn’t overburden itself with any complicated logic, or try to be clever or original. In fact, it’s honest to the point of self  mockery. And that’s exactly what’s great about it, it is a paper thin and imminently predictable string of cheap thrills. There is no reason to feel at all guilty about enjoying every minute because it doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t.

All these sites contributed rad content to Blair Week:
Satan's Hope Chest - Chained Heat and Savage Island
Camp Movie Camp - Grotesque and Nightforce
The Horror Section - Hell Night
Full Moon Reviews - Bailout
Illogical Contraption - Repossessed
Lines That Makes Things - original Linda inspired artwork
Breakfast In the Ruins - Exorcist II
B Movies and Beyond - Summer of Fear
The Manchester Morgue - Rollerboogie
Happy Otter - The Chilling
Ninja Dixon - The Witchery
Unflinching Eye - Linda's fall from grace.
Lost Video Archive - Savage Streets and Born Innocent

Prison Girls

Prison Girls

United States - 1972

Director -Tom DeSimone

You gotta give props to the artist for the point-of-view artwork that plays on both the 3-D-ness of the film and the potential viewers desire to be dominated by hungry women!

Women's Prison Massacre

Women's Prison Massacre

Italy - 1983

Director - Bruno Mattei

Vestron Video, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 29 min.

It hardly seems necessary to elaborate the plot of this film since in broad strokes it is so similar to many others in the genre. In fact this one is so similar to another film in particular, Violence In a Women's Prison, that thinking it might be the same film under an alternate title, I almost didn't bother watching it. In Violence, Laura Gemser is an undercover reporter investigating the claims of, ahem, excessive violence in a women's prison. In this one, she is no longer undercover, but actually imprisoned because she was betrayed by someone. It has pretty much the exact same cast as Violence, and as I came to suspect fairly quickly, is in fact a sequel to the earlier film.

Although on this VHS box the director is listed as Gilbert Roussel, it's obvious from shot one that Bruno Mattei is at the helm again just one year after giving us the stark repugnance of Violence.
There is a distinct difference between the Women In Prison Films of Italy and those of the US (I'll throw in the UK too). In the Italian films the antagonist always ends up being men. Despite the fact that it takes place in a women's prison, and the warden and guards are also women who enjoy subjecting the inmates to various denigrations. In the end, the perpetrators are always men; usually directly, but sometimes merely indirectly, through the physical or psychological coercion of the warden et al.

The Italians focus on male violence against women, as brutal as it can get. It's an attempt to elaborate real life behavior to its logical extreme. It's male violence fantasy, call it hard WIP.
In the US more often than not the focus is what men suspect or wish that women did when they weren't looking. Catfights and lesbianism, sure there's violence, and for the most part the women are still reliant on men, but really it's about women's power struggles within the confines of prison (and society at large). How do they work out their own power heirarchy . It's male sexual fantasy, soft WIP


Put it this way, I have never seen an Italian WIP comedy, and I have never seen an American WIP where the protagonist gets raped by a man.

Mattei is a case in point (though I can think of numerous others) where the focus of the film is really direct physical male violence against women. In the case of Women's Prison Massacre a number of violent male prisoners are transferred to the bleak cavernous womens prison before their execution. A list of their melodramatically brutal prior crimes is elaborated several times at length on screen. And then of course they escape their chains and subject the inmates and the guards to predictably gruesome acts, it is a massacre after all. The whole thing is scored by the cheesy suspenseful synthesizer music (here by Luigo Ceccarelli) which seems to have been required by Italian law in every exploitation film between 1975 and '85. As much as I am a completist and I'm glad I have and can watch these Italian WIP films, I find it difficult to actually enjoy watching them. For that reason I can only tentatively recommend Violence In a Women's Prison and Women's Prison Massacre.

Both films are available on DVD from Mediablasters, but since I found this nice VHS tape on my last trip down to my hometown in New Mexico I thought I'd share more of my thoughts on the genre with you.

The Naked Cage

Naked Cage

United States - 1986

Director – Paul Nicholas

Media Home Entertainment, 1987, VHS

You might think the movie hasn’t started yet and you’re watching a trailer for a Disney picture about animal husbandry when you spot the first scene coming over the horizon like a gilded unicorn. Buxom blonde Michelle (Shari Shattuck of Arena and later, director Jim Wynorski's Body Chemistry 3) lives the life of a perfect adorable princess well into her twenties, all soft focus, Slisbury Steak dinners, cooing mothers and underthings that smell like sunlight and Jesus. This is the kindof girl that prays every night for god to bless her horsies, c’mon, she actually enjoys her job as a bank teller. Like director Nicholas’ earlier women-in-prison film, Chained Heat, Naked Cage also centers around an innocent baby-fatted princess thrown into the grinder of prison only to come out all tits and gristle on the other side.

Alright!
That’s the first exclamation of enthusiasm coming from the jutting rugged jaw of Willy (John Terlesky of the title role in Deathstalker 2 also directed by Jim Wynorski). Willy picks up a fashion-punk chick named Rita from the side of a lonely desert highway. Over lunch at a roadside diner, a cop takes an interest in Willy’s stolen Corvette, and Rita exposes her inner ex-con by airing out the cop’s brain. Later, after Willy snorts some victory cocaine off her titties, Rita convinces him to rob a bank, but he makes one last drug addled reconciliation plea to with his wife (? This is never clarified) the angelic untainted Michelle. Rebuffed, (and probably a few grams later) it turns out that they’re robbing the same bank that doe-eyed Michelle works at. (big surprise) Michelle tries to intervene in the whole blundering operation, to make Willy stop, to turn him back into the sunshine, but when she jumps in the getaway car to staunch the flow when he is shot, she is taken as an accomplice and is prison bound for all the usual visual vice and expected sin.

Inside she is forced to wear a demeaning little rag of a miniskirt and befriends the stringy-haired waifish drug addict inmate Amy who she counsels in positivity with sparkly sigh-heavy bragging about her pony. The Warden, with a rat’s nest of blond curls piled and sprayed to a rigid finish, gives Michelle the lesbian warden speech. Please me, and your life here will be easy etc. Hmmm, in case you were wondering just what that means, or maybe just wanted the warden to be a little more specific, hold on a sec…

In the Warden’s boudoir, bedecked with every tacky 80’s aesthetic convention short of a Lamborghini poster, she spanks and is spanked by a pillowy chested inmate in low-grade bondage gear and competing spray-hardened rats nest. If you aren’t too distracted, you’ll notice that the inmate is pocketing, er, pantying something, go back to being distracted it never gets explained. But do pay attention to the pug-nosed creep in the closet, he’ll be back in just a … WAIT There he is, raping one of the black inmates before hanging her.
Brought to task by the leader of the black prisoners, Brenda, the Warden upbraids “Smiley” the rapist, but as we know, in detail, she has her own prisonerette vice and there is an uneasy a live and let live, racist-rapist-homicide policy.

Suddenly Rita shows up in the mess hall and you know she’s pure poison because she’s already sporting a custom modified punk prison issue miniskirt and single dangling feather earring. That’s concentrated anarchy waiting to happen.
Good timing too, I was just starting to think Michelle wasn’t going to have a shower scene. But as if to punish me for being such a shallow slob, Rita emerges from the roiling steam to slash Michelle up with a knife, waking her up from her nightmare. This is where things start to get a little bit complicated and overly serious, blame it on director Nicholas who’s Chained Heat (1983) was equally brimming with bloodletting and boobs. He’d rather bite the tongue off than stick it in the cheek.

Here Michelle incurs the wrath of the Warden and her pal Smiley by refusing to rat on the other inmates, and by sticking up for Amy when her pimp comes around. Sent to solitary so Smiley can have his perverse revenge, Michelle shows him how quick a country girl can learn that testicles are sensitive to kicking.
Also like Heat, Cage follows an uplifting arc of revenge and renewal with the inmates rebelling and Michelle chucking Rita onto a giant open fusebox festooned with dangling wires where she fries ever so believably in a shower of sparks like a horsefly on a bug zapper. I don’t think anybody has died like that since 1988.
Having kicked down the rotting house from the inside, Michelle can return to innocence and her 70’s ranch-house all American lifestyle to make out with her stupid pony.