Rant #2,513: Chain Gang

Yesterday, I told you about the pleasures and frustrations I had about being home as much as I have during the past year.

 
Happily, my personal story had a somewhat OK ending, in that I did find something to keep my mind going as I enter full retirement.
 
My next quest as a retired Don Quixote is to help my son find employment, and I have found that it isn’t going to be easy to fulfill this goal, but I have to keep trying because that is what I do as a father, keep trying.
 
But in between the successes, the failures and everything else, there is some down time in my life right now, and as I explained yesterday, I often eat up a lot of that time by watching television.
 
But not just any TV … due to Google Chromecast—clearly the greatest invention since sliced bread, in my opinion—I am able to find movies on the Internet and cast them to my TV, and boy, have I found some doozies.
 
I have described them here one time or another, and as you know, I just love trashy movies from the early 1970s, grindhouse fare that I often saw when these films were new in movie houses throughout Long Island that showed these films as part of low-budget double and triple features.
 
And theses films could only have been made in the late 1960s to early 1970s, because of their subject matter and what they were able to show viewers, scenes that could not have been shown in any other time to general viewers.
 
The other day, a slow day with not much on my plate, I discovered another one of these films, from 1974, one of the watermark years for these films to exist in.

(I am going to be describing a "hard-R" rated film here, so if that upsets you, please don't read on. I fully understand.)

 
“Fugitive Girls,” or “Five Loose Women” as it is also known by, is a film about five convicts who somehow get out of jail in their quest for a bushel of loot that was hidden by one of them on the outside.
 
The film is implausible, makes little sense, is exploitive as any movie I have ever seen, but kept my eyeballs on the screen for its less than 90 minute running time.
 
Yes, it is so bad that it is good, so to speak.
 
Directed by Steven C. Apostolof—supposedly a disciple of Ed Wood Jr., considered the worst film director in history—the movie opens with an R-rated sex scene between the beautiful Dee—played by an actually stunningly beautiful actress, Margie Lanier, who did a couple of these films and then moved on to other things, I guess—and her beau.

After this scene plays out, the beau says he wants to get some liquor, but he only wants to go to a certain liquor store to get the liquor. Dee drives him to the store, where her beau ends up pulling a gun on the shop owner to steal what he wanted. A shot is fired, the beau runs out to the car where Dee is waiting for him, and when she refuses to help him get away, he throws her out of the car and takes off.
 
The police come, and witnesses say that Dee was involved in the holdup and the shooting, so she is carted away to a minimum security prison—and they tell that to you several times, a minimum security prison—where she meets up with four other convicts, some in there—a minimum security prison—for murder.

 
Anyway, they allow Dee into their confidence—one way they do it is that the group leader, who just happens to be a man-hating lesbian (Tallie Cochrane), has a sexual encounter with Dee that pushes the envelope even for an R-rated film—and they let her in on their plan to escape the jail and get to one of the convicts’ (Rene Bond) hidden money that she stole to get her in jail in the first place.
 
The quintet—which also includes the requisite black convict (Jabie Abercrombie) and another (Donna Young), who  smuggled dope to get into the pen—make their way out of the jail in pretty easy fashion, but their encounters along the way really make the film so bad that it is good.
 
Along the way, the fivesome meet up with the requisite hippies on the road, including one hippie girl who bears a striking resemblance to Carol Wayne (yes, there too), but isn’t her. One thing leads to another—sexual encounters and violence--and they are given hippie clothing to replace their prison duds.
 
Later, they meet up with a guy who wants to pick them up as hitchhikers, and not only do the fivesome have the audacity to steal his car, but they also sexually attack him for good measure.
 
Then they meet up with a middle-class couple, whose husband just got back from ‘Nam as a cripple, and they not only knock over the guy in the wheelchair, but they sexually assault his wife right before his eyes.
 
They also meet up with yahoo bikers, some other backwoods people who have the intellect of a fingernail, and they pretty much always get what they need to get by. Smart convicts? I don’t know if I would go that far, but they are streetwise, and that gets them by.

 
There was a lot of friction between the five convicts throughout the film—lots of racist stuff between the black convict and the one who hid the money, for one—and one by one, one convict loses her life after another as the police are hot on their trail.
 
Finally, it is only the one who hid the money and Dee, and Dee is finally picked up by the police, and told right on the spot that she was wrongfully imprisoned, because her former beau has confessed that she had nothing to do with what he did.
 
But that still leaves the one who hid the loot, who finds it and gets her due later on.
 
This film is the typical exploitation film of its era, with lots of violence, lots of nudity, lots of phony grinding, terrible dialogue, and bad acting. It was shot in some deserted areas of California, I would assume, so at least the sets were natural.
 
And as a bonus, the previously mentioned Ed Wood—who supposedly was a co-writer of the movie—actually appears in the film in two very small roles, so if you are into exploitation cinema of the early 1970s, this movie is a cornucopia of badness, but in a good way.
 
But whatever happened to Margie? I looked her up, saw that she made several other films like this in the exploitation genre—R-rated, not X-rated—and then evidently left the business without a trace.

 
She was a truly beautiful woman, and how she ended up as an actress in this genre is probably a story only she knows. She is probably in her 70s now if she is still around, and I am sure if she wanted to, she would have a great story to tell.
 
But whatever the case, “Fugitive Girls” is a movie about female empowerment, if you stretch its rather thin parameters. Girls incarcerated, girls break out, girls do what they have to do, and then, girls get their due.
 
I guess that is what female empowerment meant to many people in the early 1970s, but it certainly doesn’t mean that today … but I guess you have to get the door open to be able to break through it, so a film like this did just that, I guess.
 
But again, only in the early 1970s would a film like this get made, get distributed, and get seen by a drive-in crowd and become a popular cult film as it has during the past nearly 50 years.
 
Cast your aspersions aside and give this a try—both men and women. You will never get back its 83-minute running time, but you won’t think it is wasted time either.
 
Anyway, I have a major doctor’s appointment tomorrow, so I will not be here on Friday at the blog.

Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.