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Reform School Girls
[Anchor Bay]
1986; color
Directed by Tom DeSimone
Starring: Wendy O. Williams, Pat Ast, Linda Carol & Sybil Danning
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Back in the day - the day, for the purposes of this review, being the mid-'70s - Women In Prison films were a dime a dozen; which is not a reference to their collective budgets. (Insert sound of rim shot here.) By the time the mid-'80s rolled around, the genre was as dead in a pool of stagnant water as any beaten down and imprisoned yet still spunky lass who decides, in a moment of adrenaline fueled stupidity, to make a run for it when the perpetually watchful eye of the perpetually gun toting guards' backs are turned. And, for the record, that is pretty dead. For whatever reason though, director Tom DeSimone decided the genre was ripe for an appropriately '80s-ified return to the euphemistic jail cell and the result is Reform School Girls. Not the best WIP film by a long shot (my personal top three would be - in alphabetical order - The Big Bird Cage, Big Doll House and Caged Heat) but, in retrospect, considered by fans to be one of the benchmarks of the genre. Although, in this reviewers opinion, that consideration is pretty much solely due to his forethought in terms of casting two women with a legitimate level of cult status, then and now, Wendy O. Williams and Sybil Danning. Granted, his decision to cast the former as a teenager when she was clearly at least a decade removed from that age range was questionable, as was his even more egregious decision not to cast Mary Woronov at all. I mean, even if he didn't want to use her in the role of the prison social worker with a heart of gold, I'm positive he could have found some way to work Principal Togar into the festivities. Of course, unless you watched this DVD with the commentary track on, you wouldn't know about that part. Part of me wishes I didn't know about that part, but I do. Anywhoo, I first saw this movie somewhere towards the end of the '80s, when one of my male friends who had a hard on for Wendy O. rented it. (As ALL of my male friends had a hard on for her, it could have literally been any one of them.) It didn't make too much of an impression on me and, in fact, the only things I mentally retained from that viewing was how incredibly great she looked and how unbelievably bad the movie was. Now that I have rewatched it, I've found I don't have too much else to add to that assessment. Except that the soundtrack is good. And I wish DeSimone actually had made a parody of '50s WIP films, as he claims this was intended to be. (Again, information gleaned from the commentary track.) Unfortunately, unless we're talking about Pat Ast's over the top performance as the evil prison matron, the comedy here is of the "laughing at" not "laughing with" variety, and you need the second one when you're trying to parody something. All of this should probably be taken with a grain of salt though, as I am clearly not the intended audience for this or, really, any other WIP film. Guys who dated suburban strippers during the mid-'80s, or just wish they had, very well may enjoy this more than me.
—Bunny
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