Women's Prison
(aka Women Prison, Woman Prison, Woman's Prison)
1988; directed by David Lam

Rather than being the out-and-out salacious exploitation fare one tends to expect with "women in prison" films, David Lam's gritty 1988 entry Women's Prison has more in common with Ringo Lam's Prison on Fire (which, perhaps not coincidentally was released the prior year) than pictures like the T&A classic Caged Heat.

During the 1980's, there was a rise in crime in Hong Kong, which led the colony to have one of the highest rates of incarceration in Asia. Many Hong Kong residents thought their prison system was outdated and run by corrupt officers, and that simply throwing criminals into jails did next to nothing as far as rehabilitation goes. This feeling extended into popular media, especially after the success of crime-themed films like A Better Tomorrow that tended to show criminals in a more positive light, or at least as not total villains.

Though one couldn't really call Women's Prison a positive movie, nor is the lead character, Kelly (Pat Ha), a hardened criminal -- she is sent to the jug after assaulting a loan shark shaking her family down on her wedding day -- the captive ladies here, for the most part, are not the sexed-up violent femme fatales usually seen in films like this, with most of them worried about simply surviving their time in jail and the guards (and, by association, the system and rules they bend and abuse) becoming the defacto villains of the picture.

Where Women's Prison doesn't stray from the norms of the genre is having the problems inside the prison walls climax in the seemingly inevitable climax of a riot, which results in some brutal scenes of violence. The somewhat overly-happy and cleaned-up coda, accompanied by Maria Cordero (who plays the lone sympathetic guard) belting out a Cantonese version of "House of the Rising Sun", undercuts a bit the dramatic tension that was built up for the previous ninety minutes. For the most part, though, Women's Prison ends up being one of those under-rated little gems from the 1980's that were overshadowed at the time by their bigger brothers, but are still well worth watching now.

RATING: 7