Before Jonathan Demme hit the big time in Hollywood with movies like Silence Of The Lambs, he was part of Roger Corman's stable and in 1974 he was recruited to keep Corman's women in prison gravy train rolling along with his ode to wronged inmates and twisted prison guards, Caged Heat.

A lovely young girl named Jacqueline (Erica Gavin who will always be remembered for her work in Russ Meyer's fantastic Vixen) is busted for drugs and in turn shipped off to the penal hall in Connorville. She soon befriends Maggie (Juanita Brown of Foxy Brown) and Pandora (Ella Reid), and the girls put on a skit in the recreation room. This friendship gets them into trouble though, as the tough as nails warden, Superintendent McQueen (Barbara Steele of Mario Bava's masterful Black Sunday), isn't too happy with their performance.

To get the dissenting prisoners back for their public display of dissatisfaction, McQueen enlists the aid of the prison doctor to get her revenge. He's got a penchant for illegal electroshock therapy and bizarre medical experiments and she knows just the type of girls who would be perfect fodder for his diabolical machine. Rather than go down like suckers, eventually the inmates band together in hopes of making it out of Connorville alive and with all of their synapses still firing properly.

A few stand out set pieces from the film include a dream sequence where an inmate makes out with her boy toy through the bars of the prison in which she's being held captive while wielding a knife at him. A slaphappy inmate versus inmate scene provides us with some great 'she ripped me off' dialogue and the required inferred lesbianism that always seems to work its way into the women in prison genre. Before we hit the half hour mark we've found our way into the shower room where the naked and perky inmates rub themselves down as the camera leers. An inmate attempting to escape is shot to death against a red and white striped background, and there's a rape scene thrown in for good measure. A few strange moments that include some medical experimentation are a bit more disturbing than the rest of the film, as they're cold and clinical and lack the camp value that some of the other exploitative elements of the movie have. The inevitable shoot out at the end of the movie is sufficiently bloody and makes good use of a few well-timed squib detonations.

So while Caged Heat does meet the requirements of the women in prison movies, it works on a different level in that it also provides us with some truly bizarre set pieces. In one scene, the over the top theatrics of a play put on in the penitentiary bring the crowd to a roaring frenzy in a strange and dreamlike moment. Some of the lighting and cinematography infers that there's more going on in the movie than just what is put on screen in front of us, that something is working on a much more sinister level. While it's hardly surrealism on the level of Bunuel or Jodorowsky, it's definitely weird for the sake of weird in a few spots.

Performance wise, we're in very good shape with this film. Barbara Steele shines as the malicious warden, performing her sinister tasks with the utmost diabolical glee. She's got enough sex appeal to be interesting but still manages to come off as a hard ass throughout, using those instantly recognizable and ever so expressive eyes of hers to her advantage. Gavin doesn't have quite the intensity here that she brought to her signature role in Vixen but she certainly looks the part well enough. Look for the late, lamented Cheryl 'Rainbeux' Smith of Lemora – A Child's Tale Of The Supernatural in a small supporting role as an inmate named Lavelle, while Amy Barrett of Humanoids From The Deep shows up to play a character named, oddly enough, Amy.

At seventy-nine minutes it's a short film, and Demme ensures that although he's taking his chicks in chains picture in a somewhat different direction that his New Concorde predecessors like Jack Hill, he keeps that action moving ensuring that drive-in audiences would never be bored with the end result of his efforts.

Video:

Once again, Caged Heat is presented in a fullframe that appears to be the original aspect ratio for the film – if it was matted, the compositions don't seem to be too compromised here. In terms of image quality, this looks like the same transfer that was used on the earlier New Concorde release but thankfully that transfer wasn't half bad. A few spots look a little worse for wear and there's some grain and print damage evident pretty much throughout the duration of the film but it's never overpowering. Compression artifacts aren't really ever a problem but there is some aliasing and a bit of edge enhancement here if you want to look for it. Skin tones look all right, black levels could have been a tad stronger. Overall, this is an good looking transfer, even if it does appear to be the same one that New Concorde used on their DVD a couple of years back.