|
Caged Heat
[New Concorde Home Video]
1974; color
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Starring: Juanita Brown, Roberta Collins, Erica Gavin, Ella Reid, Rainbeaux Smith & Barbara Steele
|
|
It's not often that a director's first film becomes a standard bearer for an entire genre but Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat is easily one of the best women's prison flicks ever. This movie hits just about every mark necessary to put it over in a big way: good girls, bad girls, even badder girls, an evil warden, dumb/inept male guards, and plenty of action, action, action. Former Russ Meyer starlet Erica Gavin (Vixen!, Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls) makes her final film appearance here, which is a damn shame because not only is she hot - in the prototypical '70s way - she's a good actress. If she'd stuck with it she could have been one of Charlie's Angels; or at the very least part of The Doll Squad. But enough editorializing, on to the show… when we first see Jaqueline Wilson (Gavin), she & her two male cohorts are in the middle of a drug bust and subsequent shootout. One guy gets away, the other gets shot, and our girl gets sentenced (by way of a voiceover) to a multi-decade prison term. She settles into her new surroundings fairly quickly, but not without ruffling the feathers of the top resident badass, Lavelle (Rainbeaux Smith). We're also introduced to the warden, McQueen, played by one of the true queens of the B genre, Barbara Steele. She's wheelchair-bound, and fanatical in her devotion to reforming her charges by any means necessary—and most of these means are by way of the resident pervo-doctor, whose passions include taking topless photos of unconscious girls (and assaulting them), electro-shock therapy, and lobotomies. One thing that sets Caged Heat apart are the completely bizarre, almost psychedelic, dream sequences that Gavin, Steele and at least one other inmate have. While I believe they're supposed to be some sort of revelatory statements about the characters, they're really just plain weird. True to the genre, the movie is loaded with everything from catfights to attempted escapes to torture sessions and more. The pivotal piece of the story is the successful escape by two of the girls (Gavin and Smith) who then go back to the prison to liberate a few of their comrades—and get a little revenge, if time allows. Needless to say, from the time these two make their break up until the time they get back to finish the job there's TONS of mayhem and criminal antics, and when they make their dramatic entrance, jailbreak and escape it's about as over-the-top as women's prison flicks get, complete with one of the all-time anti-hero endings. Essential viewing.
—the Kommandant
|
|
