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d. Paul Nicholas; pr. Billy Fine, Monica Teuber; scr. Aaron Butler, Paul Nicholas; ph. Mac Ahlberg; m. Joseph Conlon; ed. Nino di Marco; cast. Linda Blair, Sybil Danning, John Vernon, Tamara Dobson, Stella Stevens, Henry Silva, Nita Talbot (98 mins)

CHAINED HEAT FACTS: PROMOTION - with typical women in prison (WIP) aplomb, the marketers went with the tagline "What these women did to get into prison is nothing compared to what they'll do to get out." (read more); FILM TALES - Linda Blair was convinced to do a topless scene in the film's shower scene set-piece, making the film a distinct Blair cult favourite; SPONSOR DETAILS: This review of Chained Heat is sponsored by Inkstone Digital - the latest ebooks for as low as $8.95 with new titles added weekly (read more); Scrolling News Ticker by Mioplanet;

During the 1970s the women-in-prison film became a favoured exploitation sub-genre, resulting in such as Jonathan Demme’s Caged Heat and Jack Hill’s Big Bird Cage.

Although these films had titillation and sadism as their pre-requisites there was an aura of camp fun about them. By the early 1980s, however, a noticeable and far more nihilistic movement in so-called grindhouse cinema began to affect the women-in-prison films and they thus became much grimmer when former porn director Tom DeSimone drew on Demme’s work for The Concrete Jungle. Not content with that hit, the producers then teamed with émigré director Paul Nicolas to make Chained Heat, a film so riddled with sheer contempt that it drowned the camp qualities that had initially endeared many fans to the genre. Virtually a recreation of DeSimone’s film, Chained Heat stressed the gratuitous nudity, graphic sexual violence and base humanity to the point where it offended mainstream critics. Somewhat thus dismissed as the genre’s nadir, it became a notorious cult hit only critically noteworthy as yet another of actress Linda Blair’s career misfortunes. Although director Nicolas continued to work in the women-in-prison film with The Naked Cage, the next popular film in this field was again by DeSimone, who in Reform School Girls would turn away from Nicolas’ sombre intentions and return the genre to its camp sense of titillating fun.

Chained Heat concerns the inherently corrupt operations of a women’s prison. Warden John Vernon runs a prison drug trade and likes to videotape himself having sex with select inmates.

He is aided in his free-enterprise debauchery by head officer Stella Stevens. Soon, Vernon finds out about another drug source coming into the prison and wants Stevens to look into the matter further. Stevens, however, is apparently infatuated with prison doctor Henry Silva and is aiding him in this rival drug business, intent to challenge Vernon. A new inmate (Linda Blair) is brought into the prison and soon has to contend with lesbian intimidation by other inmates (including exploitation queen Sybil Danning). Blair is offended by the sexual exploitation around her and soon becomes involved in the racial tensions between the white prisoners and the few Afro-American ones (headed by Tamara Dobson). Blair finds a friend, who soon takes her out of the prison for a secret sex party run by Silva, who has been luring the women into his fold for drugs and prostitution. Blair finally refuses to be drawn into this and in desperation goes to see Vernon. Vernon then confronts Silva and must face Stevens’ wrath. After being punished, Blair seeks to enlist the other women in a plot intended to finally bring down their oppressors and expose the abominable prison practices to a visiting official. An all-out riot subsequently engulfs the prison.

Despite the private battles within the prison population their power games are essentially petty and exist only at the instigation of the prison authorities, the oppressors who exploit the women in their charge. The film establishes male authority as the true abomination as both Vernon and Silva are intent on profit and debauchery and care nothing for the fates of the women. Hence, the film’s sense of tragic moral failure falls on Stevens as the lone voice of potential matriarchal authority but so contaminated by the desire for power and by hopeless romantic infatuation that she can only serve male authority. Though she may hope to supplant it, what she would offer is not an alternative but an imitation. Indeed, the taint of such authority and power oozes down onto all lower levels of the power hierarchy until even the microcosm of feminist order that is inmate society serves likewise to do the bidding of corrupt male exploiters and their representative agent. Such authority results in the commoditization of women and even the nudity here is joyless in a film determined to negate any semblance of moral propriety in its depiction of prison order. Only lesbianism offers perhaps an alternative although true to the genre such is offered as a voyeuristic spectacle. Despite such an awful climate though, the film seeks to find some semblance of moral restoration.

Such restorative power is found in Blair’s catalytic presence in the prison social structure. She is the innocent in this foul world, the film careful to reveal the crime that brought her there as more accidental than malicious.

Her fate is thus something to be fought over by predatory exploiters intent on abusing, debasing and damning her. It is her outrage that alone enables change and purgation in the cesspool of social Darwinism that director Nicolas considers the prison to be. The restoration of moral order and a true matriarchal solidarity is finally what the film considers the only possible solution for a social order so debased by the power rooted in male authority. Out of debasement thus emerges revolution. Although the film is in no way subtle about its intentions it deliberately uses the material of disreputable exploitation cinema to make a rather subversive socio-political point. On that note, it is thus also significant that the drug users amongst the prison population are all white, the Afro-American inmates having learned from experience that such indulgence only further enables the oppressors. Indeed, an arguable thesis thus emerging here is the need for oppressed women to be politicized into revolution, a process done only through their debasement – thus they either acquiesce, long for such power or hope to challenge it: hence, ideas of the true and responsible use of power and authority saturate this bleak movie.

Vision
The transfer is presented in 4:3 fullscreen only and is of a consistent but low quality. Such griminess is in keeping with the deliberately dismal cinematography by Mac Ahlberg. The film looks grungy: it is full of ugly greys, greens, and blues and riddled with shadows. Scenes set in cavernous boiler room basements carry a fetid quality: these are the bowels of the prison system. Darkness is seemingly perpetual and the sets are filthy and ruinous, appropriate for a film about moral decay. Flesh tones are appropriately hot, though sometimes orangey; and the lighting in Vernon’s office carries ironic warmth. Playful nudity in the obligatory shower scene is held against the scenes of rape and sexual exploitation as the film self-consciously juxtaposes the genre’s means of sexual spectacle – but always in relation to authority and its oppressive nature. The progressive darkness makes for a heavy determinism. Alongside the expected motifs of confinement and the play on women behind bars are some expressionistic point of view and tracking shots and a use of backlighting effects as more stylized moments beckon amidst the naturalism. Violence is treated with brooding relish here, although this UK release is trimmed of over one minute of such material, perhaps robbing it of any disturbing ambiguity. The ritualistic quality of prison life is well established although technical sloppiness (boom microphones in shot) is repeatedly evident.

Sound
The sound is available in Dolby Digital mono only. Once again, these technical limitations reinforce the grimy oppression throughout this film. Gunshots echo, nicely breaking the score and then settling into low-key diegetic sounds. At first there is surprising ambient detail in offices and such like although gradually such background detail is stripped. As the ambience is ever sparser, voices are used in a constant play on notions of authority, with much made of Blair’s mild demeanour, compassion and even tenderness as perhaps the remaining vestige of traditional femininity in such surroundings. Hope thus lies with her. Foul language recurs and the stylized dialogue at times makes for a sly assessment of these established codes of femininity as all female characters are seen and heard as Blair discovers them and positioned for the viewer in relation to Blair. The rather dated synth-type score is judiciously deployed; it too is less frequent as the film descends into its moral abyss, returning in the background to the final action scenes. Voices and major diegetic noises dominate, the transfer serving them capably. In such a calculated minimalism, the sounds of running water in the shower scene (a celebration of female sexuality and desirability) in a correlation to the sense of exploited femininity symbolically become the sounds of leaking water from drains stressed in the latter scenes set in the catacomb-like prison basement.