Cellblock Sisters: Banished Behind Bars

Yes, yes, there is the obligatory strip search scene and the group shower scene, but CELLBLOCK SISTERS delivers a little more quality than the typical girls-behind-bars exploit. On the one hand, the revolvers sound like cap guns, and Christi Engel dyspeptically eats the scenery as Warden Smith. On the other, Annie Wood turns in a fine performance as April (the bad sister), sort of a female equivalent of George Clooney, both menacing and appealing at the same time. Apparently she has not appeared in any films since 1995, which is a shame. She seems to have star potential. British actress Gail Harris is competent as May, the "good" sister, but the oversized breast implants hinder her credibility as an ingenue. Unless she's playing a tart, she needs to keep her clothes on.

Cellblock Sisters is a name that smacks of Caged Heat or other similar women-in-prison soft-core films, but be warned...Cellblock Sisters is not about sex. At all. Sisterhood has been a long forgotten theme in hollywood. Sure there was Little Women, but what other major movies have stressed the importance of loyalty and trust amongst sisters? That's where Cellblock Sisters comes to the rescue. In a captivating story of love and devotion, two sisters (separated as infants and meeting for the first time in their twenties!) risk their lives for one another in a dangerous, all women state prison. This movie made me wish I had a sister...someone I could trust, love AND SOMEONE WHO I COULD KICK HOLY ASS WITH!! YEAH! Cellblock Sisters let me learn that the only bitch bitchier than the superbitch is that bitch's long lost sister. The bitch is on!!! (Bitch)

Pretty decent for the prison/exploitation genre. Two sisters are given away by their mother. One turns out to be good, the other bad. The good one goes to jail. She's really cute, and, of course, gets picked on. Sis helps her kick butt.

Banished behind bars - the plot of this jail-movie is only modestly interesting. Anyway, the pop-art visuals give this flick an interesting look. What else? All in all this is a kind of movie which is easy to consume - certainly no revolution but well designed. (Resumen: ¡El diseño esta de pelos!)

If you're going to produce a campy women-in-prison film and cast beautiful actresses as innocent girls-behind-bars you've GOT to have at least one scene (preferably several) involving dangerous prison women (the warden, guards, or other inmates) wanting to have sex with them, right? Well, this film has NONE OF THAT! It's like a war film with no explosions, or a gangster film with nobody getting whacked. A pretty-girls-in-prison movie with no lesbian scenes whatsoever? Obviously whoever put this one together didn't have a clue. Or else they thought that watching women pretend to fight each other was exciting. (Hint: It isn't.)