Chained Heat (1983)

To me, this movie is perfection.

Absolutely the worst movie.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

CH is a guilty pleasure of camp this is as addictive as Krispy Kreme donuts. It's highly unlikely you've ever been in a prison like this one. This is a film that set a new tradition of prison films where the facilities are infested with corruption by it's staff. Vernon, who did a score of films with Blair, plays the corrupt warden who lives in the prison. His den is one of sex and rape, and he has a video camera to prove it, as well a Jacuzzi, where he makes his pics while having sex with the drug addicted inmates, one tasty scene near the start involving a young blabbermouth phillie who sorrily gets her just desserts. Racial confrontations, lesbianism, violence, murder, this film has it, not even a bad script, either. But deep down we know, this is very far from Oscar status. I liked Henry Silva, who plays a real sleaze, who works with the governor (a really good Stella Stevens). He sneaks the girls out for partying and entertaining dirty old men. I liked how all the prisoners, all came together near the end, compared to all the animus they shared earlier, where finally, after many ugly incidents, they decide to turn things around. These films are so stereotypical of Blair too, who uses a couple of the same lines, she uses in other movies. CH is a guilty pleasure of sleaze, one of the most entertaining flicks of this kind (and there's many others floating around, believe me.

The plot is simple enough: nice, ordinary girl experiences the thrill of her life in some dingy prison. The crazy/hot chicks are at one another's throats every two minutes. The prison warden is a horny junkie with a jacuzzi right in the middle of his office. His right hand is a feminist sadist prison guard who betrays him with another equally sleazy man. There is nudity, gore, drugs and absurdity at every plot twist. Almost all characters exhibit zero acting ability with a few exceptions and poor Linda Blair wonders what she's doing in the middle of this camp festival. By far one of the worst movies I had the pleasure to see and for that reason it's a classic case of "it's so bad/laughable that it's good." There is one big-breasted prison guard who doesn't appear topless in any scene. Other than that I have no complaints.

In spite of the undeservedly and even ridiculously low rating of 3.7 out of 10 here on this website, at least most of the reviewers seem to agree with me that this is simply one of the greatest (undoubtedly even THE greatest) so-called "Women in Prison" exploitation classic ever made. Seriously, this sick puppy has literally everything you could possibly be looking for in a sleazy & shoddy exploitation flick: raw action, extreme violence, suspense, wondrously stereotypical characters, gratuitous nudity, steaming hot sex footage, campy music, suitably filthy set pieces and gloriously over-the-top performances from a dreamy all-star B-movie cast. Unlucky cherubic beauty Carol Henderson must serve 18 months in prison following a deadly car accident she caused, but she never could have dreamed she would end up in the most derailed and improperly run women's prison facility in the world! All sorts of putrid and impure business take place in this institution and, even worse, everyone gets away with everything! The head warden Bacman (John Vernon in an awesomely sneering role) built his office into a luxurious loft where he shoots private sex film starring the inmates and forces them to snitch on the others. His first captain – Stella Stevens – desperately wants to steal his position and does whatever she can to frame him. She and her lover Lester (played by Henry Silva who's the personification of sleaze) also run a very profitable escort service for which he smoothly sneaks out prisoners and rents them out to wealthy customers. Then there's another duo of wardens who pay tough chick Ericka (Sybil Danning) to rape and abuse defenseless new arrivals and then, last but not least of course, there's the usual type of conflicts between the prisoners mutually. You know; the gang of Ericka versus the black girls led by the tall-legged Tamara Dobson and Linda Blair's diplomatic attempts to unite them all together against the prison authorities. "Chained Heat" is a stupendously terrific and ultra-trashy classic in the field of 80's exploitation classics. Writer/director Paul Nicholas clearly wanted to pay tribute to the preceding 'Women in Prison' movies of the seventies (like, for example "Caged Heat" and "The Big Bird Cage") but actually surpassed all those titles in terms of dementia and sheer entertainment value. The film provides full frontal female nudity every couple of minutes and even the slightly more prominent ladies in the cast aren't too embarrassed to show a little bit of T&A. Personally, I sure as hell prefer gazing at a fully matured Linda Blair showering in prison rather than a 13-year-old version possessed by the devil and vomiting pea soup! "Chained Heat" comes with my highest possible recommendation, in case that wasn't made clear enough yet.

I was expecting something a lot more exciting then this. What a snoozer!! Very bad dialogue and terrible plot as this movie quickly goes in the wrong direction by dwelling too much on racial tensions between the inmates. This movie could have been better served with just the evil warden scenario.Another problem is that this flick needed more attractive inmates, not just two or three to make up for the ten other ugly ones. Iam not sure if they were trying to make a realistic movie about a corrupt female prison and then it went bad or what, but much of this movie never made sense. The poorly written lines and the boring fight scenes makes this a forgettable movie. I was really looking forward to a good WiP movie and instead I felt really let down.