Lust for Freedom

This Troma Women In Prison film ticks all of the genre boxes and then some. It takes a while to get going, kicking into gear at about the half-hour mark with the obligatory shower scene, after which it's non-stop trash and sleaze all the way, making it hugely entertaining for fans of exploitation cinema.

Melanie Coll stars as Gillian Kaites, a former undercover cop who is framed by a corrupt sheriff, finding herself thrown behind bars at a women's correctional facility where the warden and staff use the inmates for their own perverted pleasures and to line their pockets.

Here's a quick rundown of some of the delights on offer…

Catfights, including a no-holds-barred wrestling match to the death.

Full frontal nudity, most notably from '80s scream queen Michelle Bauer.

A flogging/lesbian sex/rape montage, set to a heavy rock song.

Seedy warden Maxwell (Howard Knight) making snuff movies.

Scar-faced psycho Indian Jud (John Tallman) forcing himself upon innocent inmate Sharon (Elizabeth Carroll).

Elderly white slaver Doc Bass (George Engelson) leering over 17-year-old hottie Holly (Terri Beck).

Jud killing a couple on the highway, setting fire to the man and forcing the woman to crash her car (which explodes).

A violent breakout in which Gillian blasts the deserving guards and warden with a machine gun (resulting in lots of blood!).

High art it most certainly isn't, but for those with a taste for the outrageous, Lust For Freedom is well worth tracking down. I rate it 7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb.

I also caught this on USA "Up All Night" a few years ago. My friend and I stayed awake until 3 AM just to finish it. It was too ridiculous to ignore! I also couldn't believe people actually spent money to make this film.

"Lust For Freedom" is the type of movie you watch with your buddies when you're all looking for a few thrills and a bunch of laughs. There is gratuitous violence. There are performances worse than what you see in a soap opera. There are scantily-clad women running around, fussin' and fightin' as they try to escape some slavery ring. If you're on the hunt for MINDLESS ENTERTAINMENT, "Lust For Freedom" is just what the doctor ordered. If you're looking for something even marginally intelligent, don't bother.

I saw this film on USA's Up All Night and it was like finding a priceless gem. It is a great film that everyone should see because it tells about the importance of freedom and how quickly it can be taken away from us. In the wake of 9/11 I think that is the most important message of all. A fine young actress named Melanie Coll stars as a policewoman who is framed and thrown into a hellhole prison and must fight to survive. She gives a really gutsy performance as the courageous young officer.

There may be messages here about the importance of freedom, but they were lost amid guffaws prompted by the abysmal quality of this movie. The screenplay was awful, the acting for the most part dreadful, the editing appalling.

Melanie Coll is marginally better than most in the film, but hers is hardly a sparkling performance. Many of the rest of the cast appear to be enthusiastic amateurs.

It appears that the censors have forced cuts to the version put on to DVD in the UK in 2004, probably because of excessive violence. But the cuts were made with sheep shears rather than anything sharper, so the viewer is left wondering how the action has moved on so quickly and inexplicably.

Don't waste 90 minutes of your life on this garbage.

A film that sums up the eighties more than this, it would be hard to find. Pulsing synthesiser soundtrack, non-stop, screaming rock and roll, no-plot, aimless violence, total lack of any decent characters, and yes…very few real actors. It's a cheap, low-budget, sensationalistic thrill-ride, set in a woman's correctional facility. It's a Troma movie, the hallmark of absolute garbage, and yes, it's a well-earned reputation. This is a terrible, tacky work of zero-budget sexploitation, only with very little in the way of interest.

The story drags its' heels over just under ninety minutes, with Melanie Coll as a policewoman who gets captured by a crooked cop of an even more crooked city of flesh-peddlers, and generally unpleasant characters. However, things are surprisingly dull; it's not exactly the "Hell on Earth" that it could have been. Coll just sits about in prison for most of the entire film, looking at other people having a hard time. Her dull, gaping performance is nothing special, yet the voice-over she provides manages to make a really bad film seem even worse, along the lines of Harrison Ford's drudge-like tones pasted on top of Scott's "Blade Runner". To be fair, unlike budget-eating Ridley Scott, most of this is because the entire movie has been shot silently to save money, with most of the dialogue added in in post-production, often in totally no relation to their lip-movements.

The other stylistically rather irritating thing about this film is, it has been hacked-about considerably – this 82-minute version has endless jumps in in it, which, when you're watching a piece of very unsubtle exploitation, is frustrating, because you end up with all the dull bits, without any of the cheap thrills. However, there's still a couple of rather memorable moments, mainly a very lovingly filmed lesbian sex scene between "Crystal Breeze" and Michelle Bauer, and a disconcertingly well-choreographed wrestling scene between Dee "Queen Kong" Booher, and Elizabeth Carlisle. Worth a mention, definitely, is Elizabeth Carlisle's performance as the feisty bad-girl, Vicky, who gives a decent account of herself, in a rather over-the-top fashion, which is nonetheless entertaining.

Equally over the top, is Judi Trevor's "Miss Pusker", a fierce faced prison warden, who is referred to at one point as being "Like something from a bad movie?" Do I hear anyone disagree with this? Nah. Her interrogation scenes with Amy Lyndon, are something of a highlight, and some of the few scenes which don't appear to be too heavily cut about.

Main baddie Jud, a big Native American, is physically impressive as a creepy nutcase, but to be honest, in a Troma movie, it isn't hard to act like this. In fact, there's a car chase scene in this which seems to have come straight from Tarrantino's "Death Proof". In fact, I'm sure Mr. Q T would love this kind of movie, the sort of thing which "Death Proof" is a tribute to in the first place.

The ending is a ridiculous confusion of shouting, and people being shot, but to be fair, we've all kind of given up by this point, crushed under the weight of that god-awful theme song, as well as the "Rock You to Death", theme song. God, turn off the rock! Not only that, it's about twice the volume of the dialogue, which means you'll have to do a lot of fiddling about with the volume. Or, just mute it every time the music kicks in. Makes me wish they'd just stuck to the synthesisers in the start of the movie.

Overall, then, this is a movie which you are never supposed to judge as an art piece. It's just a piece of cheap exploitation, albeit a very heavily edited one with just a couple of decent scenes in it. Even as a "woman in prison" movie, a notorious sub-genre, it kind of fails, because there's so many scenes of literally nothing at all happening, with slow dialogue scenes in offices, no matter how sleazy and sensationalistic the DVD cover art tries to make it look. It's just a prime slice of the eighties, where everything was just so very loud, cheap and silly. Thre's a few really creepy, sordid moments, which hinge on the deeply disturbing side, but there is no denying that it does have a handful of relatively enjoyably exploitation moments, especially the longing close-ups in the Breeze/Bauer sex scene, which kind of makes you wish there's deen a lot more of this, than Coll just moping about doing nothing whatsoever. It's not a total waste of 82 minutes of your life, just maybe a very poor use of about seventy of them. Worth a watch, but be prepared to have to sift through a lot of crap, in order to get to the better bits.

But, in the wake of recent mainstream cinematic events, it is worth pointing out that this movie actually does pass the much-demonised "Bechdel" test: there are about a dozen women characters, at least half of whom have names, most have dialogue. They all talk to each other, and definitely about something other than men. So, does that mean this is a feminist approved movie? I'd love to show the cover of this movie to a feminist, and say to them, "This passes the Bechdel test."(Personally don't really care that much about the ruling, because what difference does that make? Movies with no women in them are generally rather dull. But I'm sure you know that already. Or else, why would you be reading this?)