In the 80-odd years since the cinema began, roughly 3,000 films have had at least some significant scenes set inside penitentiaries, reform schools or good old-fashioned jails. Though not all of these centre on female characters, bad girls have long been a staple of B-movie production. Why do film-makers have a fascination with this genre?

Firstly, they’re cheap to make – not many genres allow you to get a quantity discount on the costumes. Sets are also easily obtainable, a few old prefabs and a couple of rolls of barbed wire are all that’s needed. Secondly, the moral tone of them ( and few exist where the naughty bimbo doesn’t repent by the end ) allows them to get past the censors more easily than movies with an ambiguous moral stance. Thirdly, and possibly most importantly, it’s a good excuse for a lot of T & A.

The earliest candidate yet tracked down for the title of First Female Felon Film is ‘Ladies of the Big House’, made in 1931 where the heroine ends up in jail after getting set-up when she Just Says No to a gangster. The 1950’s saw any number of teenager-in-trouble movies, but few actually spent much of their running time behind bars; ‘Untamed Youth’ and the original ‘Reform School Girl’ (both 1957) are two that did, though in the former, prison was rather like summer camp, even down to Eddie Cochran being there to play the odd guitar solo. The next burst arrived in the 1970’s when Roger Corman’s New World Pictures were at the fore-front of things, with a battery of films nearly all of which can have their titles re-created by perming any two from ‘Women’, ‘Heat’, ‘Cages’ and ‘Chained’, then adding an appropriate preposition to taste. Few were shot in the States, partly to save money, partly (no doubt) to avoid law-suits from the American Correction Association. Tom de Simone, a name that should be familiar to regular readers, has become the Master of Misbehaviour, for films like ‘The Concrete Jungle’ (1982), a film once described as “a movie of staggering ineptitude”. I can give it no higher praise than that.

Although often highly similar in plot (thin), characters (stereotypes) and raison d’etre (though inclined slightly more to violence than nudity) men-in-prison films have never had the same appeal for me. Despite ‘Prison’ and ‘Ghosts of the Civil Dead’ both being good films, they’re a little too restrained and, well, SERIOUS to be in the same league as ‘Reform School Girls’, a film well documented in a previous issue (TC2). And the more exploitationary ones haven’t a great deal to interest me…

This point of seriousness is something that does divide the female side of the genre as well. On one side you have deep, social comment such as ‘Scrubbers’; at the other end of the rainbow you have Fred Olen Ray’s ‘Prison Ship Star Slammer’, the most ludicrous sci-fi film I’ve ever seen, which used items from films as diverse as “Logan’s Run” and ‘Flashdance’ – in between, you have a full range of serious disguised as exploitation (‘Caged Heat’ directed by Jonathan Demme, who went on to do ‘Stop Making Sense’ and also New Order’s ‘The Perfect Kiss’; they had another of their promos, ‘Touched by the Hand of God’, directed by Kathryn Bigelow of ‘Near Dark’ fame who has not, as far as I know, had anything to do with any women-in-prison films) and exploitation pretending to be serious. The best way to tell the difference is to look at the characters; if there’s no doubt about ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, you’re almost certain to be watching an exploitation film.

A fine example of the pseudo-serious is the utterly appalling ‘Red Heat’. No, not the Arnold Schwarzenegger one, this had Linda Blair as an American in an East German prison whose boyfriend mounts a rescue mission from the West. Sylvia Kristel was on the staff and the film was remarkable only for it’s total lack of redeeming qualities to make it worth watching. Unfortunately, this was the first bad bimbo pic I ever saw and it did just as impressive a job at putting me off the genre as seeing ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ when I was 15 did for horror films. It was not until a triple bill of ‘Caged Heat’, ‘Jackson County Jail’ and ‘Reform School Girls’ at the Scala that I realised the breadth of the genre. The second mentioned is something of an anachronism as it’s really a WOMAN-in-prison film. Yvette Mimieux has one of those weekends when everything goes wrong and ends up in jail. It contains a scene where she is raped by a guard, which is one of the most unpleasant such assaults I’ve seen. Exactly how it should be.

It’s interesting to note the self-cannibalism that goes on – certain scenes and incidents from ‘Caged Heat’ appear, almost frame for frame, in ‘Reform School Girls’. The line between homage and plagiarism is very thin. Similarities to the girls-school film also mean it’s possible to consider one as a sub-genre of the other. Both have women without men, uniforms and a large number of opportunities for shower scenes. This is more marked in some films than others – ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’, which oozes repression and sexuality from every frame, is clearly more closely related than ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’.

At the other extreme, we have the concentration camp sub-genre, the reductio ad absurdum of the prison movie where nothing is left except the violence and the sex. Films like ‘Love Camp 7’, ‘SS Experiment Camp’ and ‘Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS’ could almost be considered liberal, in a warped way, since they’re about the only place where the sexes get to mix, more or less freely. These are unwatchable affairs with heavy sadistic tendencies, ‘Ilsa’ being salvaged, at least partly, by Dyanne Thorne’s manic over-acting. Unsurprisingly, these have come in for a fair share of flak from regulatory authorities for a variety of obvious reasons – on the other hand, ‘normal’ naughty nymphette movies usually escape via the moral and inconsistently illogical loop-hole that considers violence by women on women to be more acceptable than violence by men on women. Run that by me again, will you?

As we head into the 90’s, the market for all these films shows no signs of diminishing – any halfway decent video shop will stock several chicks-in-chains pics, though whether you’ll find them on the adult, action/adventure, comedy or horror shelves depends on the whim of the owner. Admittedly, you might rent a ‘Red Heat’, but on the other hand, you might get a ‘Prison Ship Star Slammer’ or some similarly surreal epic, with sex, violence and humour. What more could you possibly want from a film?