A movie poster for the 1986 film ‘Reform School Girls’ with Wendy O. Williams, Sybil Danning and Andy Warhol pal Pat Ast (pictured prominently above).
 
The “WIP” (“women in prison”) film genre has several sub-genres ranging from nuns in prison to an interpretation favored mostly by European filmmakers who loved to include Nazis in their chick-centric prison flicks. Italy, Germany, and France put out quite a few WIP films back in the 70s and 80s, as did the U.S. of A. and the Philippines. When the first women in prison films made their way to the big screen they were more dramatically inclined. One of the very first films to tell the tale of a girl behind bars is Hold Your Man starring the profitable on-screen power couple of Jean Harlow and Clark Gable. The film is full of some pretty salacious stuff. Thankfully, this was 1933 and Hollywood films were still getting away with more on screen prior to the enforcement of rules laid out in the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 being widely adopted within the industry as it wasn’t really wasn’t policed until late in 1934. Which made a film like Hold Your Man—whose plotline involved a gorgeous blonde getting stuck behind bars while she’s knocked up with her lover’s baby—possible.

You can find WIP films in every decade but because both the 1970s and 1980s are so near and dear to my heart—and because I’d quite frankly love the opportunity to do another one of these posts—we’re going to stay put in those two consecutive decades. The genre can be pretty strange and runs anywhere from girl-heavy drama which would generally fall into the “redemption” film category to straight-up pornography. In the 1950s WIP films were heavily influenced by pulp fiction novels but it wouldn’t take long for the films to evolve (or devolve perhaps) into exploitation flicks with lots of nudity, sex, violence, rape, and notably deviant plotlines.

The popularity of the genre and its many sub-genres soared during the 70s and 80s which would bring us , Chained Heat starring teen queen Linda Blair and Wendy O. Williams’s prison warden in Reform School Girls. So now that I think I’ve given you more than a few compelling reasons to take a deep dive into this strangely complex film genre, I’ve posted a large selection of WIP movie posters that are mostly NSFW as you would expect them to be.
 

‘The Big Bird Cage’ with Pam Grier and Sid Haig
 

A German movie poster for ‘99 Women.’
 
More after the jump…

 
Two soul classics: Pam Grier and She’s Gone by Hall and Oates.

The first video is the full length version of She’s Gone (not the radio edit) nicely synced up with scenes from Foxy Brown. The second is an example of a great song wedded to an abysmal video. What were they thinking?

 
She’s Gone video gone wrong after the jump…

 
Mark Hartley—the man who brought you Not Quite Hollywood, the documentary on ‘70s and ‘80s Australian action, suspense and horror b-movies—is back to lay the same treatment on the Philippines. Machete Maidens Unleashed shows how that country became the shooting locale for tons of American-funded monster movies, jungle prison movies, blaxploitation and kung fu hybrids—along with better known shoots like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which apparently left the land strewn with sets that got repeatedly reused.

Adding to the genre-crazy atmosphere was Prime Minister Ferdinand Marcos’s harsh and corrupt Bagong Lipunan (“New Society”) program of martial law, during which he and his family ruled with the kind of impunity that eventually led to his downfall in the mid-‘80s.

Check the trailer—it’s quite wild—and look for this ‘un soon at yr local movie establishment.
 

 
Thanks to Mark Turner for the heads-up!