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Movie Reviews
Women in Prison
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10 Violent Women (1982) |
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| Four of the largely indistinguishable ten violent women. |
Judging by this movie, Ted V. Mikels is a no talent hack. There, I said it. This movie is by turns boring and incoherent. The budget was apparently big enough to make a decent product, but there is fundamental gap between Mikels’ skills and the creation of an interesting movie. The plot is long, convoluted, and stupid. I won’t go over it in detail, but I’ll try to summarize it, and then pick out a few scenes for further comment.
A group of eight women gold miners (!) decide to trade in their picks and shovels for a life of crime. They plan an unnecessarily complex jewelry store heist, which is sort of successful since they do get away with some loot, although the girls don’t seem to have much of a clue about how they might sell the jewels. Eight leads proves so unmanageable that Mikels allows half the girls to disappear from the plot by just not including them in various scenes. He also give us virtually no distinguishing characteristics other than names, and since I didn’t have the patience to try to keep track of so many leads I’ll refer to the characters generically.
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| Hard to see because the picture is small, but apparently miners wear a random collection of shorts, tank tops, and sun dresses. |
The last two thirds of the movie involves the remaining four girls trying to sell the jewels, which leads to a violent confrontation with a fence-cum-drug dealer. They rip off the fence, but soon end up in prison when one of the girls tries to sell the dope to a couple of undercover cops. There they meet two other girls (which in addition to the eight original makes ten total promised in the title) and have to deal with a brutal, maniacal guard and lecherous female warden. Finally, they break out, but group divides again, and now we have only two women left. They end up running into an Arab sheik who has been pursuing the group in order to recover a valuable scarab ring (!) stolen during the jewelry store robbery. In the end, the two remaining gals sign up for a life of virtual white slavery as dancers/entertainers about the sheik’s yacht. They’re happy about this turn of events.
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| The women in happier times. Gotta love that wallpaper. |
A talented filmmaker would have had a hard time with all of this, what with ten or more main characters, various location shifts, and a convoluted plot. Mikels definitely bit off more than he could chew. There is a website out there that makes it seem as if Mikels is still working. I find that a little hard to believe, although if Fred Olen Ray finds work, I guess anyone can. The acting might charitably be called wooden. Other equally applicable adjectives would include: inept, strained, and at times distracted. Watching this movie you almost get the sense that many of the actresses are somehow being blackmailed into participating.
It isn’t clear why Mikels chooses to establish the women as miners to begin with. Mining never factors into the film later – it might have been interesting if the women had used their mining skills in pulling off capers, but that doesn’t happen here. Indeed, I am being generous when I say Mikel’s "establishes" them as miners. They aren’t dressed for it and don’t seem to have much comprehension about the nature of the task – they nearly blow themselves up with TNT and when they "finally" give up the life, it turns out they’ve only been working at it for a couple of months. If the movie had been set in the 1850s, the image of a group of lazy miners hoping to strike it rich quickly might have been plausible... for a movie set in the 1970s-1980s, it seems less likely.
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| A relatively simple job, complicated to the point where two of the thieves end up having to strip down in an alley. Very inconspicuous. |
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The jewelry store robbery is wild. It involves two cars, a team of spotters, some decoys. They ultimately take a hostage and switch cars and clothes in broad daylight. Man, that is lot of risk and investment for a jewelry store... especially if you don’t have a good plan for selling the goodies. Instead of luring the guard away and then kidnapping one of the employees, why not just go into the store with guns drawn and tie up the employees? Seems safer and more low key. But I guess that if you have an eight-member gang, you sort of need to find work for all of them.
The scene with Leo the fence (played Mikels himself) is actually sort of interesting. The gals are pretty clueless about how things work. Leo tries to give them dope instead of cash for the jewels. He claims he’s offering them three time more in drugs than they asked for in cash. I don’t know if this sort of barter arrangement is common in the world of crime, but it seems problematic. Do most jewel thieves also have drug distribution contacts? Seems unlikely. This is, however, the only genuinely entertaining scene because when the girls try to haggle too hard, Leo tries to rip them off, at which they pull out guns and turn the tables on the fence. The scene ends with Maggie (I think) killing Leo by repeatedly stabbing him in the chest with her stiletto heels. (Maggie, played by Dixie Lauren, is a piece of work – a drunker, more reckless version of Mrs. Roper from "Three’s Company" down to appearance and dress.) Placed in an otherwise competent movie, the bit with the heel would have been enough to make this film a cult classic, but as it stands it is solitary moment of inspired zaniness.
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| "Maggie" and "Leo" (Mikels himself) shortly before the shoe murder. |
Anyway, the girls end up taking both the jewels and the drugs when they leave the dead fence’s abode. One of them is wounded in the scuffle, however, and the recriminations from this split the gang in half once and for all -- allowing Mikels to whittle the cast down to a manageable size. The remaining gals go out for a drink. But then Maggie – the heel killer – gets blasted on tequila shots and tries to sell the dope to a couple of narcs. There is no question of entrapment here. She staggers over to them uninvited and says that she has some "good s__t" to sell. Would even the most inept criminal try to initiate a drug deal this way? They try to arrest her. She draws a gun. They shoot her. The audience cheers.... Well, at least I did. Or what have if I hadn't been half asleep at this point.
Of the four remaining gals inside the bar, two end up in prison and two disappear from the movie. I don’t recall why, and I can’t say I have the patience to watch the movie again to find out. The fact is that as murky and tedious as the movie has been to this point, the prison sequence is so dull and dumb as to deter any efforts to detail the proceedings.
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| I'm guessing this is not a typical prison shower. |
That said, we get the usual – lesbianism, cruel guards, inmate catfights, and so on. One catfight even takes place in a shower – although Mikels must have used up his nudity bonuses by this point because the gals primly shower in bras and panties (except for one unnamed extra). The nice touch in the shower scene is the graffiti on the walls, which is either a weird "artistic" choice or the result of shooting the scene in an old high school locker room. We also get one scene where the horny female warden – who is old enough to make all of this quite unappetizing (think the old lady from the Old Navy commercials) – whips one of the gals while her religious-fanatic chief guard recites vaguely apocalyptic pseudo-scripture. This scene might have been creepy if introduced and shot a bit more competently; instead, it just seems tedious (it does go on for a while).
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| Um, not a pretty sight. To whom exactly is this supposed to appeal? 70 year old exploitation fans? |
The final escape sequence involves one of the gals finally giving in to the warden’s advances, except – psyche – she turns the tables and overpowers the old hag at the last moment. How original. With the warden’s stolen keys, she leads a successful breakout. The movie then groans to its creaky conclusion. The girls are on the lam. They accept a gig working on-board a ship, only to find it is owned by the sheik whose scarab they stole in the robbery at the beginning of the movie. He bring a cop to arrest them, but then – psyche – because he has recovered his ring he declines to press charges. The two remaining girls, now attired as belly dancers, welcome the chance to remain on board as... what? Guests? Dancers? Sex-slaves? For a movie that starts off talking about women’s lib, this is a particularly bizarre ending. I sort of think Mikels might have just run out of film. Also, I didn't realize that armed robbery, kidnapping, murder (of Leo), drug possession and dealing, etc. could all be washed away just because no one was willing to press charges. Can’t the state prosecute this kind of offense regardless?
This movie does have some high points. The shoe killing is obviously the most inspired bit. I also sort of liked the completely absurd chapter headers that appear on-screen to transition from one scene to the next at various times. They hint at a goofy sensibility that is sadly lacking in the rest of the movie. What makes this movie painful is that it is pretty damn boring, all things considered. The plot grinds along, "propelled" by numerous expository conversations. But the dialogue is so stilted and tedious that these scenes feel like filler -- if you can’t write good dialogue, then silly is a welcome second best, but these scenes are neither good nor silly. Then the entire prison sequence – which, btw, is one of the only reasons I wanted to see this movie – is desultory. It really took a conscious effort to sit through it. Oh, and about half the scenes are shot at night with improper lighting. If the DVD looks this murky, I suspect anyone watching this on video might find it literally unwatchable. There looks to be enough budget behind this movie to make it interesting; the only thing lacking was the talent.
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(1.5 out of 5)