Women in prison

A women in prison film is an exploitation picture set in a women's jail, a formula Roger Corman's New World Pictures fixed in 1971 with The Big Doll House. You can set your watch by the structure: a wrongly convicted newcomer, a sadistic warden, a corrupt doctor, a shower, a solidarity plot, a riot, an escape.

The economics

Roger Corman built the modern version. The Big Doll House (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972), both shot in the Philippines by Jack Hill with Pam Grier, set the template and its budget. Filipino production was cheap, the jungle could stand in for anywhere, and a New World picture could turn a profit before it left the drive-in circuit.

It globalised immediately: Italy produced Women's Prison Massacre, Japan produced the Scorpion films, and America produced a long direct-to-video tail through the 1980s.

Before Corman

The type goes back to Hollywood melodramas of the 1930s, such as Ladies They Talk About (1933), where the prison was a stop on a young heroine's road to a righteous life. A whole film inside a women's prison came in the 1950s, with Caged (1950) and Women's Prison (1955). The turn toward exploitation came in 1969: Jess Franco's 99 Women was a US hit, and the same year Love Camp 7 fed both this cycle and nazisploitation. The BBFC refused it a UK certificate in 2002 for video and again in 2020 for streaming.

The cast of characters

The inmates include a sarcastic prostitute, a snitch and a tough, under a cruel warden. The newcomer goes through an intake ritual, and the third act is a riot, an escape or a prison fire. The jungle variant sets it in a fictional banana republic and ends with a revolution that frees the political prisoners. Pam Grier turned up in several, among them The Big Doll House and Women in Cages.

The one that got reviewed

Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat (1974) made the warden a woman, added a satirical tone and a John Cale score, and was received kindly by critics. Demme had written it as Renegade Girls; Corman declined to fund it because he thought the cycle had peaked, then distributed it.

Abroad

Italian directors pushed the sex and violence further, as in Bruno Mattei's Caged Women (1982). The Japanese entries tend to be revenge stories, most famously the Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion series with Meiko Kaji (see the Kaji profile). Hong Kong made camp films set in Japanese-occupied China, including Bamboo House of Dolls (1973). Later the formula got crossed with other genres: Caged Heat 3000 (1995) puts the prison on an asteroid.

What is defensible

Not much, formally. What the good ones have, The Big Bird Cage and the Ito Scorpion films, is a willingness to make the guards the villains and let the prisoners win.