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Naked Cage, The
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| Year: |
1986
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Director: |
Paul Nicholas
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| Stars: |
Shari Shattuck, Angel Tompkins, Lucinda Crosby, Stacey Shaffer, Christina Whitaker, Nick Benedict, John Terlesky, Faith Minton, Aude Charles, Angela Elayne Gibbs, Carole Ita White, Lisa London, Leslie Scarborough, Valerie McIntosh, Larry Gelman
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| Genre: |
Thriller, Trash |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Rita (Christina Whitaker) is hitchhiking across America when she is picked up by a young man in a red sports car; he is Willy (John Terlesky) and very pleased to see her, so pleased in fact that he offers to buy her a meal at a diner since she complains she hasn't eaten today. However, once at the establishment a cop pulls up outside and takes an interest in the car, so Willy excuses himself and hides out in the men's room, but when the lawman asks to see Rita's I.D. she attacks him, the owner of the diner is shot dead and so is the cop. She orders Willy to help himself to the till money and off they go in a stolen truck, holing up in a motel room where they enjoy cocaine he snorts from her breasts. But Rita wants to live the high life, and that means getting more cash...
It just so happens that Willy's girlfriend Michelle (Shari Shattuck) works in a bank, so this seems the ideal opportunity to exploit their relationship. When you know this was the next film director Paul Nicholas (an alias) made after trash epic Chained Heat you might have a notion as to how this will play out, as that was one of the big favourite women in prison movies of the nineteen-eighties. However, it was also a time that, by 1986, the most significant genre example was Reform School Girls that had gone all out to be as campy as possible, thus the fashion for such lurid entertainments had turned a corner into its parody phase and the writing was on the wall. This made The Naked Cage something of a last gasp of a style that defined the sleaze of the seventies.
For what it was, you could do a lot worse, as it featured the required thrills and spills and titillation that had become staples since Eleanor Parker was incarcerated in Caged back in the fifties, kicking off a craze for these storylines that petered out around thirty years later when erotic thrillers became more or less the norm for delivering the mix of thriller and softcore, now on the home video market as audience became shy about attending these movies unless they had a major publicity push to become hot conversation topics: see Basic Instinct for the most famous (or infamous) instance. This left a Cannon production, such as this, with the option to be shown at one of the theatres of their cinema chain, or be relegated to VHS rentals; both happened, but the sun was setting on those "chicks in chains" melodramas as they were dismissed.
Certainly Nicholas was not going to skimp on the elements which had proven successes in this field, namely sex and violence, at times combined as Chained Heat had pulled off in a way that was almost self-parody (it was assuredly ridiculous) but retained just enough of a straight face to make it look genuinely concerned about women's prisons whose head wardens kept a hot tub in their office to entertain selected inmates. The problem here was not that it was badly done, it was actually professional, even slick, for all its sensationalism, but that it was overfamiliar. We had really seen it all before, and if you hadn't the clichés were now set in stone so that even the celebrated Charlie's Angels episode on the subject was part of the canon, and that didn't even feature nudity.
This did, in a gender twist in Chained Heat as the warden was a lesbian, played by veteran Angel Tompkins, who preys on the prisoners who catch her eye, some more willingly than others (and including sadomasochism with her as the submissive!). Once Michelle is behind bars as Rita gave false testimony she was in on the botched bank robbery, everything is designed to transform her from a sweet country girl into a hardened jailbird as she has to put up with the top dog among the inmates (Faith Minton, who looks like Dwayne Johnson had he been born a woman) extorting protection money from everyone else. Making friends with fragile ex-junkie Amy (Stacey Shaffer), our heroine is keeping her head down and doing her time when the presence of a mad rapist among the guards arises, and the segregated prison is threatened with a race riot (though the film doesn't go quite that far), and as if that wasn't bad enough Rita arrives and wants Michelle's head on a platter. Eventful and pacey, it was too late to revitalise the genre, but not bad. Music by Christopher L. Stone.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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