Women-in-Prison Movies
Chained Heat, 1983
A decade after The Exorcist, Linda Blair was all grown up with no place to go but WIP movies. A mixed-race prison population — with rival gangs run by blond slut-goddess Sybil Danning and the Afro-tastic Tamara Dobson — chafes under the rule of the penitentiary's sadistic warden (John Vernon). A drug lord on the side, he invites the inmates to play with him in the Jacuzzi he has in his office. Really. The same year, Chained Heat had an Italian sister in Bruno Mattei's ultra-lurid exploitationer Women's Prison Massacre, starring Laura (Black Emanuelle) Gemser as a reporter undercover in a prison of unusually extreme depravity. "Makes Scarface look like a Sunday school picnic!" the ads boasted. These two tarnished gems must have exhausted the genre. The great era of lowlife WIP movies was over.