CHAINED HEAT (1983)

"Don't you walk away from me, you chalk-faced whore!"

This is probably one of the best of the whole women-in-prison genre of sleaze-fueled epics.  It's got so many great elements to it including the mandatory exploitation ones that include your basic boobs, blood and beasts.  It also has probably the best cast of any of these sleazy caged chick flicks.  You got Linda Blair playing the basic, boring, goody-goody role.  She's supposed to be the person who the audience empathizes with but I pretty much hate her and think she makes terrible decisions throughout the whole movie.  Also she has a crappy haircut which may have also made me not sympathize with her as much as I would have normally.  The real star to me is the great Sybil Danning as the leader of all the white convicts.  She's awesome as usual as the main bad-ass.  There is one scene where she wears mom jeans that I didn't care for but besides that she's fantastic!  Who else could stand up to Tamara "CLEOPATRA JONES" Dobson as the leader of the black gal gang?  I did notice on my latest viewing that her gang seems to consist of a grand total of about 4 people which seemed a little lopsided in whitey's favor here.  As far as beasts go there's Sybil's sidekick, the butt-ugly Spider, who appropriately enough gets killed while hanging out on a crapper. There's also Dean Wormer from ANIMAL HOUSE himself as our ultra-scummy porn-making warden here.  This guy has to have the most amazing office in the history of wardens.  I especially dug the stuffed jungle cat with light-up eyes and the luxurious Jacuzzi in his office/swinging bachelor-pad.   Henry Silva plays a drug-smuggling prison employee in a subdued role for a guy who you always see being quite intense in most of his other films.  He does get to smack Blair around a little which reminds you of some of his more typical tough-guy roles.  There's also a ton of other memorable characters with names like Boots, Grinder and Bubbles.  Mix all these characters into a cartoonishly stereotypical world of trash and debauchery and it's exploitation movie gold.  You get rape, a black chick sliced up with razor blades,  gratuitous showering, lots of cat-fights, lesbian make-outs, a new-wave chick, death on the toilet, an 80's strip-tease show and just about everything a lover of lowbrow cinema could want.  I was lucky enough to view an actual film print of this one last night and it made me appreciate it just that much more.  In addition to a slew of unrelated movies that were re-titled as sequels there was an "official" Part II to this that starred Bridgette Nielsen and came out ten years later but I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with the original.