Jul 29, 2020

The Concrete Jungle (1982)

A Woman In Prison (WIP) film that straddles the line between being a respectable drama, worthy of the Movie of the Week, and your standard sleazy grindhouse.




 Elizabeth (Tracey E. Bregman) is dropped off at the airport by her boyfriend Danny (Peter Brown). Little does she realize, he's planted cocaine in her suitcase, using her as an unknowing drug smuggler.

 She makes it through the Paleo-TSA.

 I love shots of vintage airplane interiors.

 When Elizabeth lands, they discover the drugs and she's sent to prison.


Sadly, this is the closest we get to nudity from Tracey E. Bregman) the whole movie.

She meets her cellmates, Spider (Aimee Eccles) and fat weirdo Cheeks (Carole White



 Every WIP film has the queen bitch; this film it's Cat (BarBara Luna

 Icy (June Barrett) is Cat's right hand

Sweets (Sally Julian) is a druggie, and Cat is her only hookup.

Sweets (Sally Julian) gets into bed.  Sadly, this movie is so bereft of nudity, pathetic upskirts and such are the best you can hope for in the T&A department (minus a certain upcoming scene).

Icy demands Sweets do Cat's bidding in exchange for the drugs.

 Rita (Camille Keaton)

Rita is raped by the prison guard, Stone (Robert Miano).
  
This shit just makes me sad.  For one it's a brutal rape, for another...

It's fucking Camille Keaton... after getting raped for an hour in I Spit On Your Grave she only does one minor appearance (as a girl on toilet in Raw Force), then this - another rape. She goes from easily the most infamous rape movie of all time to again getting raped, with four years of nothing in between.  What happened?  I'm sure there's an explanation out there, but that might require a few more minutes of Wikipedia research, and I'm not that interested.  I will say that the reason the ISOYG was so infamous wasn't just the shocking brutality, but also Keaton's performance which is goddamn gut-wrenching.  She should have been a top tier actress; I wonder what happened.  This particular scene in The Concrete Jungle, while nowhere near as harsh and lengthy as in ISOYG still stands out, as the rest of this film is damn-near family friendly.

I have to say, director Tom DeSimone does a good job of juxtaposing the rape with a childbirth scene.  DeSimone had been making exploitation films since the dawn of the seventies, including Chatterbox (1977).

 Warden Fletcher (Jill St. John)

 Sweets is hauled out to isolation for having drugs.

 Like all WIP wardens, Fletcher is corrupt and sadistic.

The most boring scenes involve Elizabeth working with Shelly Meyers (Nita Talbot) to get her out of there.

Cat tells Marcy (Marcia Karr) that it's her turn with Stone after Rita.

 Marcy is beat up when she refuses to get raped by Stone.

Sweets nearly dies in isolation suffering from DTs.

 Elizabeth finds a friend and ally in Katherine (Sondra Currie).

 But Katherine is killed by Cat via pumping her full of drugs.

 This makes Elizabeth very angry, and she goes full badass on Cat.

The prison erupts into a frenzied brawl as the hoses are turned on them.

 The hoses then turn it into a giant mudwrestling battle.

 While the mudwrestling is going on, Elizabeth electrocutes Cat.

In the end, Elizabeth is able to bust not only the warden, but also her shitty boyfriend Danny.



I don't get Tom DeSimone - he consistently churns out classic exploitation and genre films (Savage Streets, Chatterbox, Hell Night, Swap Meet), but they're always surprisingly low on the T&A quotient.  I suspect it might be because he's gay, and perhaps not quite as interested in boobs as your average horny exploitation shlockmeister.

As well put together as this film is, you just can't expect anyone to give a shit about a Women In Prison film unless it's stacked with T&A.  This had nary a shower scene; basically no one gets naked except Camille Keaton -and that was not exactly erotic. I mean, c'mon - you at least have to have warden be a sadistic lesbian! If it it compensated with interesting characters and story, it might be forgiven.  Nope.

For a list of all the Women In Prison (WIP) films covered on Video Zeta One, click the image. 
★☆

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