Women in prison movies are the universal language – go to any corner of the world and some filmmaker has at one time or another stuck a bunch of actresses behind bars and made a movie about what goes in a world without men. In Spain you’ve got your 99 WOMEN (1969), in Italy your WOMEN IN CELLBLOCK 7 (1973), in Japan your FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 41 (1972), in Argentina your CONDEMNED TO HELL (1984), in Indonesia your VIRGINS FROM HELL (1987), in Hong Kong your WOMEN PRISON (1987), in Poland your INTERROGATION (1989), in Iran your WOMEN’S PRISON (2002). Hollywood spat out a few W.I.P. movies during the classic era, including LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT (1933) with Barbara Stanwyck, PRISON FARM (1938) with Shirley Ross and Marjorie Main (Ma Kettle!) as a sadistic guard, GIRLS IN CHAINS (1943) from Edgar Ulmer, CAGED (1950) with Eleanor Parker, WOMEN’S PRISON (1955) with Ida Lupino and HOUSE OF WOMEN (1962) with Shirley Knight. At some point in the 1970s, our common appetite women’s prison jiggery pokery turned ravening and we had women-in-prison movies coming from every quarter, from the grindhouse/drive-in circuit (THE BIG DOLL HOUSE… I ESCAPED FROM DEVIL’S ISLAND… CAGED HEAT… THE HOT BOX… THE BIG BIRD CAGE… BLACK MAMA, WHITE MAMA… SWEET SUGAR) and from American television (WOMEN IN CAGES… CAGE WITHOUT A KEY… NIGHTMARE IN BADHAM COUNTY). The subgenre peaked and plateaued by the mid-70s (at least in America; elsewhere, it was business as usual) but there was a slight bump in the early-to-mid 80s with the release of CHAINED HEAT (1983). Directed by Paul Nicholas (aka Lutz Schaarwaechter), this grotty little exploitation nugget jettisoned all the boring stuff from old prison movies (exposition, character development, harmonica solos) in favor of amping up the licentious bits, the violence, the sleaze and the woman-on-woman action that had always been part and parcel of the women-in-prison movie. Nicholas foregrounded and made explicit what had often been implicit in the W.I.P. canon, as if stating baldly to the moviegoing public “We all know why we’re here.” Panik House Entertainment, in conjunction with Mr. Skin (you know, the where-to-find-your-favorite-actress-naked website that has become such an institution that it rated a name-check in Judd Apatow’s KNOCKED UP) has packaged this long-time favorite (which gained most of its estimable fanbase via video cassette) with two other like-dirty-minded features: RED HEAT (1985) and JUNGLE WARRIORS (1983). Cast and crew recur from feature to feature, making this three-fer of chicks-in-chains flicks sort of like a summer stock rep company presenting one hell of a subscriber season.

The casting coup for Nicolas/Schaarwaechter in CHAINED HEAT is the participation of Linda Blair. A decade out from THE EXORCIST (1973), Blair had already spent time in a reformatory in the surprisingly frank TV movie BORN INNOCENT (1974), in which her perky juvenile delinquent learns there are badder girls than she — and learns it the hard way. In CHAINED HEAT, however, she is again the picture of innocence, a Los Angeles student of interior design who runs over a dude and winds up sentenced to 18 months in stir. Well, as you might imagine, things don’t go so well for Linda, who notices that all kinds of crazy and homoerotic things go on after lights out. (I don’t know why it is, but apparently the American penal institution hates to put women in cells, preferring to house them in open dormitory-style set-ups where people are constantly bed-hopping when all you want to do is catch your 40 winks and do your time.) Making matters worse is that warden John Vernon (POINT BLANK, ANIMAL HOUSE) deals opiates on the side and holds court in a hot tub, where he makes videos of the convicts he “mentors”; that the head matron Stella Stevens (THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE) is double-dealing behind the warden’s hairy back with high end pimp Henry Silva (JOHNNY COOL, THE BOSS) and that Silva is betraying Stevens with convict Sybil Danning, a bisexual heller who runs the show on D Block and takes a Sapphic interest in Blair’s fresh fish. The plotting! It’s like Shakespeare but with more shower scenes. (Somebody even gets drowned in the So-Cal equivalent of a Malmsey butt.) Though she’s told to keep her nose clean (which is just a weird thing to say to someone surrounded by predatory lesbians), Blair can’t help but get in trouble deep, first by rejecting Danning’s soapy advances and then by siding with Vassar grad Tamara Dobson (CLEOPATRA JONES, NORMAN IS THAT YOU?) and the black girls (all three of them) of C block, which culminates in a full scale riot that finds former enemies joining together in common cause.

CHAINED HEAT gets great mileage from sheer audacity, never caring how it looks, not giving a toss what you think of it and just barreling ahead on adrenaline and momentum. The casting alone is worth the price of admission for the cadre of faded Hollywood stars (add to the mix CAT BALLOU‘s Michael Callan) and some familiar exploitation faces (TINTORERA‘s Jennifer Ashley, BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS‘ Edie Williams, THE EXTERMINATOR‘s Irwin Keyes … and do my eyes deceive me or is that John Paragon, Jambi the Genie from PEEWEE’S PLAYHOUSE, as the tranny who has rather a bad time in the holding cell at the top of the film?). Producer Billy Fine had used several of the supporting players in a similar film a year earlier, THE CONCRETE JUNGLE (1982), with Tracey Bregman (HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME) as the young innocent and Jill St. John (DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER) as the corrupt warden but it was CHAINED HEAT that really stuck to the wall.

Linda Blair was back for sloppy seconds in RED HEAT (1985), which is essentially CHAINED HEAT behind the Iron Curtain. Though Blair moped through the earlier film as if bound by contractual obligation, she seems to be really enjoying herself here and has an actual character to play. As an American woman newly arrived in West Germany to join her soldier fiance, Blair gets to Ugly American it up a little — wearing horrid heart-shaped sunglasses and barking “Goddamnit, you can’t do this to me, I’m an American” as agents (whom she calls “douchebags”) from the People’s Republic on the other side of the wall snatch her up along with a dissident (Sue Kiel) in a bid to get back formulas smuggled out of the country. Bullied into signing a confession that she is a CIA operative, Blair is sentenced to three years in prison, squished in alongside lifers and other “politicals” and forced to make component parts for shitty socialist electronics. As stated, RED HEAT is familiar territory, with Elisabeth Volkman (LOVE BAVARIAN STYLE) as the corrupt warden and former EMMANUELLE (1974) star Sylvia Kristel as the trustee who takes significantly more than a sisterly interest in our put-upon heroine.

Directed in some kind of occult tandem by screenwriter Robert Collector and producer Ernst R. von Theumer, RED HEAT really attempts to tell a story rather than leapfrog from setpiece to setpiece and to chart the maturation of Blair’s character as she witnesses corruption from on high trickle down to infect the general population. Blair’s progressive hardening is presented in stark contrast to that of Kati Marothy, as one of those pure souls who always takes it in the neck in prison movies. Though it is steeped in more than its share of violent moments, RED HEAT‘s most disturbing tableau involves Marothy’s timid Barbara, her will broken, her soul degraded, submitting tearfully to having the name of Kristel’s Queen Bee character tattooed across her forehead as punishment for attempting to retrieve a stolen piece of property. (Pitiably, nothing more precious than an empty box of chocolates, which retains the scent of her husband’s cologne.) It won’t be too much of a spoiler to admit that Barbara fails to survive to the final fade out, her subsequent suicide setting up the film’s jailbreak denouement. Slightly more professional, slightly more ambitious, RED HEAT nevertheless can’t quite measure up to CHAINED HEAT‘s Psychotronic immortality, in large part because Blair broke her leg during filming and spends a great deal of the shoot-em-up climax being carried around by other people.

Sybil Danning and John Vernon collected another paycheck from producer Billy Fine in JUNGLE WARRIORS (1984). Fine was in place as the director when the project was put together and a pre-comeback Dennis Hopper was on tap for a supporting role but both got fired (I relate these factoids anecdotally — I wasn’t there), with Fine replaced by Ernst von Theumer (writer/producer of MAN-EATER OF HYDRA, aka ISLAND OF THE BURNING DOOMED) and Hopper by Marjoe Gortner. Another incredible cast here; in addition to those already mentioned, there’s Paul L. Smith from MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978) and POPEYE (1980), Alex Cord from STILETTO (1969) and THE LAST GRENADE (1973), Nina van Pallandt from THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) and QUINTET (1979) plus Dana Elcar (THE STING, ALL OF ME) and the mighty-mighty Woody Strode, who gets to waste guys with a bow and arrow as he had many years earlier in THE PROFESSIONALS (1966). To be perfectly blunt, the inclusion of JUNGLE WARRIORS in Panik House’s “Women in Prison Triple Feature” is really a bit of a stretch, as there’s no real prison. The women in question are a gaggle of fashion models headed for a tropical shoot whose chartered plane is shot down by cartel thugs and who become the prison-ers of a drug ring run by the incestuous brother-and-sister act of Smith and Danning.

The WIP quotient rises considerably when the models and their photographer (Van Pallandt, left) bust out of the dungeon, grab whatever automatic weapons are laying about and make some serious holes in the masonry. In the third act, JUNGLE WARRIORS becomes the movie that Joe Dante and Allan Arkush’s HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD (1976) made fun of, with people wasting one another right and left, grenades being tossed and helicopters being blown out of the sky. As with CHAINED HEAT, audacity carries the day when inspiration and innovation seem to have succumbed to subtropic heat. By this point, the filmmakers have already killed off the two potential male heroes and a surprise heroine (a seemingly inconsequential character who turns out to be an American op), leaving the frivolous women in whose company we have suffered for an hour or so to turn the tide and save the day. The sight of the icy Van Pallandt handling a submachine gun and screaming out “You bloody bastard!” is worth the price of admission alone but John Vernon is his usual hoot-n-holler self as a Mafiosi set to do a big deal south of the border and Danning, as usual, stamps the terra as a femme fatale with a yen for anything in a skirt… particularly if said skirt has her hands manacled above her head.

Hawking these titles as I am today, I feel obligated to make a special point regarding the specter of rape which is a component of most women-in-prison films. As these movies age, and as the often crass way that they depict the sexual violation and degradation of women becomes more and more a relic of the past, it is increasingly more problematic to defend or even just explain them as entertainment. CHAINED HEAT, RED HEAT and JUNGLE WARRIORS are programmers, they’re popcorn munchers, they are broad, outlandish, preposterous, outre… they are escapist fare and escape you will unless perhaps you have been or know someone who has been a victim of rape. I do, I’m sorry to say, and know several women to whom I would not recommend these movies. The simulations of sexual assault in these films is always depicted as a bad thing,  to communicate brutality and corruption, of the domination of the powerful over the powerless, but they also condescend to peek-a-boo nudity, which sends a mixed message that, it may be argued, defeats what seems to have been the purpose. As someone who has never taken pleasure in rape scenarios (as a kid, they seemed to me to be superfluous; as an adult, they are a painful reminder of horror that continues to abide in the world), it’s easy for me to say to you that these scenes are to be endured, if you’re able to, and to be gotten past. If it is any consolation, the guilty are punished, though more than a few of the innocent never live to take pleasure in vengeance or comfort in the restoration of order.

Having said all that, I would like to point out one of the more unusual rape scenes in exploitation movie history. In JUNGLE WARRIORS, as Nina van Pallandt and her models are brutalized, their hands chained above them, their bodies lifted off the floor as if rendered weightless in their agony, their violation is witnessed by an elderly Mexican woman (Isabel Vázquez), who seems to have some menial utility within the cartel, perhaps as a cook or cleaning woman. Her eyes rimmed with tears, the old woman leaves and enters a nearby chapel. As she prays for guidance, depictions of Christ crucified at Calvary mirror the rape of the American women, providing her with the inspiration to help in their escape. If the downside of exploitation fare is so often the crass treatment of rape, one of its hidden benefits is exactly this kind of rare juxtaposition, which suggests an uncomfortable connection between the highest hopes of mankind and its basest instincts. (Later, another character is run through with arrows, à la St. Sebastian.) If these tendencies seem madly incongruous or contradictory, well… welcome to exploitation cinema, whose raison d’etre is to jerk you around seven ways from Sunday just to hear what kind of noise you make. Luring you into its fold with things you think you want to see, exploitation often requires you to see things you don’t want to see, asking you the whole time “where do you draw the line? Where do you hop off the trolley?” If you love and hate what you’ve just seen in equal proportions and can’t stop thinking about it, if you’re inspired to take a moment to recalibrate your moral compass, or if you just walk away in disgust then exploitation has done its job.

Panik House has made a nice package of these films, with CHAINED HEAT meriting its own disc and RED HEAT and JUNGLE WARRIORS sharing the second disc. The features are uncut and presented in anamorphic widescreen. Contemporary interviews with Stella Stevens and Sybil Danning round out a modest complement of bonuses. The double disc hits the store shelves in July.