Chain Gang Women

Billy Harris has only 6 months left to serve for grass. He gets transfered out of the easy library job into hard chain-gang Georgia State Labor Farm. He is chained up with Mike Weed who supposedly killed a girl. The prisoners attack the guards and everybody makes a break for it. Harris doesn't want to run but Weed threatens to chop off his leg. They go to Harris' girlfriend Ann. While Harris is out, Weed rapes Ann. They avoid a road block and stop at a farm where the farmer has a really young wife.

This is a horribly misleading title. The filmmaking is amateurish. The lead actors are not that compelling. They're not bad as amateur actors but don't expect more than that. Harris and Weed are set up for some very compelling conflict but the movie doesn't develop it. The farmer and his wife provide some additional possibilities. However I have no rooting interest in any of them.

Sometimes I wish there were truth-in-advertising laws when it comes to movies. With a title like "Chain Gang Women", you might think you know what the movie is about. Guess again. This is not a women-in-prison movie. In fact, there are no women to be seen in the movie until around the halfway point of the movie! Had the movie found other ways to be entertaining, I might have forgiven the person who titled this movie. But this is a slow and endless exercise. It takes half an hour before the jailbreak, then the movie slows down again with the escaped prisoners not doing much more than sit on their tails while hiding. I guess the production values are okay for a cheapie - there is some decent location shooting in what seems to be actual prisons, the movie is decently shot, and they even sprung for some filming from helicopters. But the movie is often so boring that you'll be thinking of things from why the rapes come across as so matter-of-fact, to why the filmmakers thought that southern California could pass as locations in Georgia.

Theoretically speaking, nothing should be simpler and more straightforward than (s)exploitation movies from the 1970s! The title should pretty much summarize the entire plot and furthermore there should only be a lot of sleaze, violence, naked women and filthy male pigs. Show the movie poster of "Chain Gang Women" to 100 neutral persons, and at least 99 of them will estimate that it's a by-the-numbers "Women in Prison" (WIP) grindhouse/exploitation effort. But this is where Lee Frost and Wes Bishop fooled us all! "Chain Gang Woman" is NOT a 'women in prison' flick. Heck, it's not even a regular prison thriller but a sort of dreadfully boring prison musical! The seemingly never-ending first half of the film exists of nothing but footage of male prisoners working in the middle of Georgia nowhere to the sound of dire country music songs. Eventually there's an outbreak, but don't start hoping for any action or rancid sleaze just yet. There are only 2 (TWO!) women in this dumb movie and sadly they confirm all the ghastly rape fantasy cliches. None of the male protagonists has any macho charisma, neither of the females has any sex-appeal and the entire film is boring, boring, boring... There are literally hundreds of worthwhile 70s exploitation classics out there, and numerous of them actually feature the stuff that you expected to see in "Chain Gang Women", so please don't waste your precious time on this dreck.

This is pure advertising 101 right here. You have a movie about a boring prison and two unappealing convicts that escape when the lone lardass sheriff is attacked on said chain gang. If the story was good and the action well paced then you would bill this as "Chain Gang Convicts" or "Escape from Prison Hell". Or you can look at your finished product, lament over what you created, and bill it as something it is not. Voila! You now have Chain Gang Women. I truly pity the poor dupe that paid for a ticket expecting titillation via semi-nude forlorn beauties in prison only to watch this crap. The first half-hour of this tripe is spent inside of a Georgian prison that looks eerily like southern California where we meet Harris who has six months to go until he is a free man. Harris has been sent to this labor camp to finish the rest of his prison term. While there he is chained/partnered with the brutish murderer Weed who is eager to escape. I thought of escaping too by the time they get around to fleeing the prison. On the lam we finally get to see one of the two, count em' two women in this movie as the convicts hide in Harris' wife's house where she is promptly raped by Weed. Charming. After securing a change of clothes the trio attempts to go north to Atlanta in hopes of evading the dragnet. When that fails they resort to strong-arming the inhabitants of a farmhouse and wait the rest of the night out. Here we meet the second and by far the most bizarre of our women as the very young beauty is apparently married to Colonel Sanders. This poor girl not only has to kiss this decrepit old man but also gets to become Weed's second rape victim in two days. Had enough "chain gang women"? Good, because there is no more much like the plot of this movie that ends with a bang. Offscreen of course. How this movie was named Chain Gang Women in the first place is beyond me but the fact that it was retitled Women in Chains in England is even more mind boggling! A better title would have been Coma Induced Audience.

A dull 'home invasion' type thriller from Crown International Pictures. The film has nothing to do with the exploitative title, which makes it sound like one of those Filipino women-in-prison movies starring Pam Grier. Instead, it's a stodgy, slow moving tale about a couple of escaped convicts who take some women prisoner in their own homes.

It has much in common with the film WILD RIDERS, although it's nowhere near as sleazy in feel. In fact, it's rather dull and tame, and has little nudity. The actual jailbreak scene takes half a film to happen, and the resulting home invasion thrills are very diluted and lacklustre. As is so often the case from this era, the film only really gets going at the very end. Production values are sub-par, the acting is non-existent, and the film as a whole is a chore to sit through. Much like a lot of Crown's output, then.