Geekscape After Dark: Mr. Skin’s Women in Prison Triple Feature!
Cultural pioneer Mr. Skin brings the love this month with a remastered two-disc set of vintage 1980s Women in Prison highlights. Headlining the triple-bill is benchmark classic Chained Heat, starring former child star Linda Blair, Blaxploitation superstar Tamara Dobson, veteran pin-up Stella Stevens, and inimitable B-movie queen Sybil Danning. Blair also appears in the second feature on the set, a thinly veiled Nazisploitation epic called Red Heat, which features legendary ginger-haired Eurosex goddess Sylvia Kristel. Danning pops up briefly in the C-feature, Jungle Warriors, which shares a producer and partial cast with Chained Heat, but otherwise feels somewhat out-of-place in this collection.
I’m aware that some people really hate the Women-in-Prison subgenre, and it makes sense that they do. Superficially, most WiP movies are just endless parades of rape, misogyny, and sexualized violence, usually capped with a breakout sequence involving a lot of people getting thrown over balcony railings and shot in the face. Fans of WiP movies dig the subgenre for its soaped-up lesbian shower sex, hair-pulling catfights, and fluffy, pansexual power-fetish rape scenarios. There are two reasons why I think the subgenre is essentially defensible: first, it explores issues of female power and social hierarchy by amplifying them into a distorted burlesque. Secondly, it is filled with soaped-up lesbian shower sex and power-fetish rape scenarios, and I dig that.
Women in Prison movies (“WiP” to their friends) first originated as an offshoot of the “roughie” trend that began in the mid-to-late 1960s, when horny Americans were finally getting bored with movies about people playing naked beach volleyball, but were still too nervous or rurally sequestered to go looking for actual porn. Roughies were cheap softcore movies about sexual exploitation and sexual violence – a double-win for producers, who found them both easy to sell, and easy to sneak past moral crusaders, who were satisfied as long as sex didn’t seem like very much fun. Proto-WiP films like White Slaves of Chinatown and Olga’s House of Shame are still pretty shocking today, and the subgenre only got more out of control in the 1970s and ‘80s after it emigrated overseas to countries like Spain, Italy, Germany, and Japan.
Chained Heat, released in 1983, is maybe the best-known example of the WiP subgenre produced in America. Linda Blair plays Carol, an aspiring interior decorator with a really fucked up hairstyle that kept bothering me through the whole movie. She’s in prison for eighteen months for accidentally running over a dude with her car. Right after Carol and the other New Fish arrive, inmates start turning up dead – some in prison riots, others more mysteriously. The recent upsurge in violence is clearly connected to escalating tensions between two racially divided prison gangs, led respectively by Ericka (Sybil Danning), and Duchess (Tamara Dobson from Cleopatra Jones), and to one of the prison’s tyrannical overseers, Captain Taylor (played by Stella Stevens, who seriously looks EXACTLY like Lady Jaye from Psychic TV in this movie).
Mr. Skin apparently went to the trouble of engineering Chained Heat’s first-ever uncut video release in the U.S. for this set, and judging from how much boobs and ass were in there, I’m gonna go ahead and say it was worth it, although I never saw the movie in a cut version before, so I can’t vouch for the restoration personally. The sex is fairly subdued and innocent for a WiP movie, although there are a couple scenes involving physical coercion. Mostly it’s a lot of lesbian shower sex and stripteases, which is not a bad thing at all, just a little tame for the subgenre. Linda Blair is just sort of there for most of it, but whatever, I love Linda Blair, so I don’t really care if there’s a reason for her to be in a movie or not. Plus she takes her top off a couple times, which is either really weird or really hot, I’m not sure which.
The second movie in the set, Red Heat, takes place in Germany, and features Linda again, this time as Christine Carlson, a naïve American tourist who gets kidnapped and railroaded by Germans who are supposed to be Communists, but who are basically just Nazis. After being wrongly convicted of international espionage, Christine lands in the slammer where she is surrounded by hardened, sociopathic lesbians with Eastern European accents and face tattoos, the meanest of which is Sofia, played by legendary French actress Sylvia Kristel, star of Just Jaeckin’s original 1974 Emmanuel. Maybe it’s because I love Sylvia Kristel so much, or maybe it’s my nostalgic childhood attachment to Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS, but I actually liked Red Heat better than Chained Heat. I guess you could argue that it’s a rip-off of Midnight Express in some ways, but it’s Midnight Express with Sylvia Kristel, Linda Blair, lesbian shower sex, boobs, and Nazis, so I don’t know what there is to complain about. Plus it has a soundtrack by TANGERINE FUCKING DREAM, which means it’s automatically a good movie no matter what. Seriously.
Unlike the first two movies, Jungle Warriors is not a WiP movie at all really, and it also doesn’t have the word “heat” in the title (although I’m pretty sure the shrill opening credits theme song is probably called “Heat” because most of the lyrics are just the word “heat” repeated over and over again). A group of professional models crash land in some obscure part of South America that is controlled by an evil drug cartel, get chased by some guerilla thugs through the jungle, and are ultimately captured, imprisoned, manhandled, and gang raped for like 20 minutes before escaping. The movie has massive pacing issues – the first half just feels like meaningless padding to boost it up to feature length. As low-budget action movies go, the second half is pretty much fine. Chicks running around shooting machine guns at people mostly. And there’s this one part where Paul L. Smith shatters a car window with his bare fists and hoists John Vernon over his head while screaming ferally in his face, so that was pretty good. Sybil Danning is in it for a few minutes as the Drug Lord’s sister.d
Overall I’d say the set is recommendable. All three films are presented in what I’m guessing is their original aspect ratio, and they’ve been remastered, so grain and scratches are minimal. The set is pretty light on special features, but the interview with Sybil Danning is entertaining and informative. Chained Heat and Red Heat I’d definitely watch again, Jungle Warriors I’d maybe throw on in the background while I fold my laundry.
