DVD review: Chained Heat (1983)

What these women did to get into prison, is nothing compared to what they'll do to get out!

If, as we dig in the ashes of an atomic holocaust, we hoped to find just one crowning achievement of our modern age, it would be this: a boxset of gloriously tasteless "women in prison" movies.

As a sub-genre of exploitation cinema, it has it all. Gratuitous nudity, often coupled with titillating scenes of mock-bondage humilation. Stone-faced lesbian guards. Contrived and violent revenge scenarios. And in the middle of it all, some poor innocent lass trying to survive in a world she never made.

Exorcist star Linda Blair is the innocent lass in question, at least in the first two movies in this triple-decker boxset.

Chained Heat (1983) is the first, and probably most infamous, of the prison chick movies - though Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS predates it by almost ten years and is far more tasteless. Blair stars as a young woman who kills a man by accident, and must spend a mere 18 months in a hellish prison where sapphic abuse and racial battle lines are the norm. It's highly enjoyable cheese, though far less shocking in reality than it appeared when you were gazing nervously at the video box, trying to pluck up the courage to try and rent it. Indeed, by genre standards, it's fairly tame stuff - a grindhouse flick that's just outrageous enough to attract the mainstream viewer, but never nasty enough to repulse them. The fact that this sort of thing - albeit with slightly less nudity - is now primetime viewing in ITV's Bad Girls makes for an interesting signpost on our cultural motorway.

Red Heat (1985) is the next movie in the pseudo-franchise, but thankfully Schwarzenegger and Belushi are nowhere to be seen. Instead, Linda Blair returns as an all new naive waif forced to strip and shower for our viewing pleasure. This time the prison is an East German prison, and she's been accused of spying. Her previous 18 month stretch looks positively tame by comparison, as every Germanic cliche in the book is dusted off and given a good going-over. The sleaze count is higher, but the plodding subplot in which her hapless fiancee fights the system in order to find and free her does the movie no favours. Whoever thought that a film about a kinky women's prison needed more scenes of bureaucratic wrangling clearly didn't grasp the core appeal of the concept.

Finally, there's Jungle Warriors (1984), which ratchets up the comedy value even more, boasting a premise that makes Red Heat's half-arsed espionage caper look pedestrian.

A plane carrying seven sexy supermodels is shot down over South America, crashing into the middle of a drug baron's personal fiefdom. Captured and - oh yes - tormented by the drooling villains, things get even sillier when the Mafia shows up.

Despite the presence of sweat-drenched lovelies in ripped attire, Jungle Warriors stretches the confines of the prison flick a little too far to sit comfortably alongside the other two movies, and swapping aggressive lesbian warders for leering drug peddlers is not a good way to make something more titillating.

Linda Blair isn't in Jungle Warriors, but Sybil Danning is (she also co-stars in Chained Heat). Red Heat boasts a supporting turn from Emmanuelle herself, Sylvia Kristel, which automatically earns it an extra 100 kitsch points.

There's no real continuity here beyond the recurrent theme of dirty damsels in distress, and Chained Heat actually gained an official sequel in 1993 - starring Brigitte Nielsen in a libido-destroying turn. Instead what you get are three movies that, between them, pretty much sum up the smutty underbelly of the VHS era - never as grimy as the 1970s, but still deliciously wrong when viewed in these antiseptic times. Highly recommended for those who hanker for the bad old days.

Special Features

Trailers and galleries for each movie, though the cleaned up 16:9 widescreen presentation and 5.1 TS audio track are far more shiny than these movies deserve.