Reform School Girls

By 1986 the women-in-prison film had been making the same movie for fifteen years, so Tom DeSimone made it again with a straight face and a wink and somehow got the definitive American entry out of doing so. Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics, well past school age and not pretending otherwise, leads a cellblock of new fish against a wonderfully vile matron (Pat Ast, all sweat and menace) and an ice-cold warden played by Sybil Danning. Every trope is here on purpose, the shower, the solitary box, the riot, cranked up until the parody and the real thing become the same object. It is loud, trashy and a good deal funnier than the films it is quoting. If you want one American WIP picture that contains all the others, this is it.