Chain Gang Women

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.

In typical Grindhouse style, Chain Gang Women uses a suggestive title to mislead audiences into thinking they are in for 90 minutes of sweaty, sassy women smashing rocks and taking showers together. What we get instead, is two women, who only make their appearance 40 minutes in, and while they bare their flesh for all to see as per drive-in rules, they sadly wield no machine guns and lack anything resembling the charisma of a, say, Pam Grier. This is a Women in Prison (WiP) movie with no women in prison, and spends most of the time being a lame convicts-on-the-run story.

Harris (Robert Lott) has six months to go on his stint for possessing marijuana when he is moved to a chain gang and linked up to burly murderer Weed (Michael Stearns). When one of the other prisoners knocks out the prison guard with his pick-axe, the prisoners flee on foot. We see via montage the gang being gradually wound up/killed, while Harris and Weed reach the safety of Harris's wife Ann (Linda York). While Harris is out getting Weed some clothes, Weed rapes Ann, and the two hit the road again reaching the farm of an old farmer and his sexy young wife (Barbara Mills). Turned on by the prospect of danger, and leaving her dull life with the cruel old man, she takes off with the two criminals.

If all this sounds incredibly dull and methodical, well it's because it is. I would forgive the blatant lie of the title if the film managed to be interesting in its own right, but director Lee Frost has so few ideas as to how to progress the film, that is becomes reduced to a series of repetitive shots of prisoners working and fist fights, and then later a series of bland exchanges and car chases. A least they made a bit of an effort with Porter Jordan's score, as although I wouldn't exactly put it onto my iPod, it's not half bad by grindhouse standards (which is usually some twangy disco score played over and over throughout the movie).

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Neither woman is on a chain gang, and neither one appears until half-way into the film. Our two "heroes" are (English teachers: here's a way to teach the difference between protagonist and hero) on the chain gang until they escape and find two women. I am a fan of sexploitation, but there just wasn't enough in this. The film is worth watching for the charming quad-split-screen effect maximized so beautifully in "Time Code." Lower all expectations--as if merely agreeing to see a movie entitled "Chain Gang Women" weren't enough--and enjoy.

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.