Το Κλουβί της Κολάσεως

laird4.0

"NO!" - stenciled on the wall of the prisonA lot of Women in Prison movies are sexually perverse, but CAGED HEAT is perverse in entirely other ways. What weird sense of humor led to putting Barbara Steele in giant eyeglasses and a wheelchair? What youthful art-school pretensions led Demme to stick Felliniesque dream sequences in the middle of this ramshackle genre exercise? It's like he hadn't seen another WIP movie, and didn't care what the conventions were. And it's great for all of the above reasons.

Joe4.0

Compulsively watchable, which is probably the thickest thread that connects this to Demme's later work. It's funny, cool, socially conscious, and doesn't fall in the nasty misanthropy quicksand that prison movies so often get sucked into - improbably enough, it even morphs into a road movie in the last third. VIP is Barbara Steele as the steelily unbalanced prison warden McQueen. If you ever wanted to watch a women-in-prison movie with a John Cale score, congrats, you can.

Josh Lewis3.0

Was pleasantly surprised that Jonathan Demme's directorial debut, despite being made within the exploitative confines of what's expected of him out of the women-in-prison subgenre, contains quite a lot of his sense of colorful character, humor and personality. Fosse-esque arthouse dream sequences, drag shows, anti-sex female wardens/guards, more shootouts/car chases/bank robberies than expected (very skillfully and economically shot by Tak Fujimoto, and at times artfully and psychedelically cut together--the wipe transitions are insane), and some truly deranged music by John Cale. Loved the tense, ticking internal clock sequence of Belle crawling through the vents to provide Pandora with food (and a book) in solitary, and the hilarious detour into "satisfying private female wrestling." You can definitely argue as to how subversive a movie with the sheer number of shower scenes this has ultimately can be, and when the obligatory sexual violence eventually rears its ugly head in here it's a bummer, but this is as close to someone making a feminist satire of this genre as I've seen from this era. He clearly likes and cares about these women, gives them each time to tell their sad backstories (many of which involve being violent towards cops/rapists), and gives them a shot at violent revolution + driving off into the sunset together.