Reform School Girls
Reform School Girls is a 1986 film from the USA, directed by Tom DeSimone, running 94 minutes. reelscum files it under women in prison.
- Year
- 1986 · 1980s films
- Country
- USA
- Runtime
- 94 min
- Director
- Tom DeSimone
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (47/100)
Defined in the glossary: Women in prison
The women-in-prison film as its own punchline, fronted by the lead singer of the Plasmatics.
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.
Trailer
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Where to watch
Legal options in USA
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On these lists
- Women in prison: the essentials
Roger Corman worked out you could film the whole genre in the Philippines for nothing, and everyone spent the next decade reshooting his shower scene.
Filed alongside
Barbed Wire Dolls
Jess Franco's contribution to the cycle. Cheap, delirious and utterly shameless, even for him.
Chained Heat
Linda Blair goes to prison. A sleazy 80s update of the formula, with a corrupt warden and a hot tub.
The Big Doll House
Jack Hill and Pam Grier invent the modern formula in the Philippines.
Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion
Sold as a women-in-prison quickie. Shot like an art film. Meiko Kaji barely blinks.
The Big Bird Cage
Funnier and better than the first. Sid Haig is having an excellent time.
Love Camp 7
The film that invented nazisploitation six years before Ilsa made it a genre.
Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable
Ito's last. Kaji drags a severed arm through Tokyo in the opening minutes.
Women's Prison Massacre
Late Italian entry. Laura Gemser, and a body count instead of a plot.
Black Mama White Mama
The Defiant Ones with Pam Grier, shot in the Philippines by a Filipino who actually knew the terrain.
Women in Cages
Pam Grier as the sadist for once. Bleaker than its stablemates.
Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41
Ito's second, and the most formally daring film in the whole category.
99 Women
Franco doing the formula early, with Mercedes McCambridge as the warden.