Jailhouse Girls

Naive aspiring model Joanne MacIntyre (Ginger Lynn Allen) earns a living as a receptionist, blissfully unaware that her place of work is actually a knocking shop—at least until the vice squad raid the building and arrest her for prostitution. Despite protesting her innocence, poor Joanne is found guilty and banged up (in more ways than one) in a corrupt women's prison where the warden and his guards use the prisoners to satisfy their own desires.

With the WIP (women in prison) genre having already crossed over into adult territory in several Jess Franco flicks and Oswaldo de Oliveira's Bare Behind Bars, it's not surprising that the US market also got in on the action with Jailhouse Girls. Director Henri Pachard doesn't do a particularly great job, though, with his film lacking the nastiness and sleaze that such material really demands.

If ever there was a film crying out for the 'roughie' treatment, it is this one; all we get, however, is routine mid-80s hardcore action, and weak WIP elements amounting to little more than an unconvincing prison location, a lacklustre de-lousing for the inmates followed by a quick internal exam, some mild abuse, and a predictably pathetic jail-break finale. None of the women look in the slightest bit upset about their supposedly horrific ordeal (most lapping up the attention from the guards) and there's no real violence to speak of (what use is a WIP film without a little sadistic torture?). Hell, there's not even a cat-fight or a shower scene.

If straight-up, no-nonsense porn is all you're after, then I guess the film will do the trick, but trash connoisseurs expecting a really reprehensible piece of exploitative sleaze will most likely come away disappointed.