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Movie Reviews
Women in Prison
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Terminal Island (1973) |
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| Exploitation schlock or feminist manifesto? Read on and find out. |
Like many great movies, Terminal Island (1974) is bound to spur many grand philosophical debates. Terminal Island, of course, deals with such issues as the nature of crime and punishment, the death penalty, and relations between men and women. But the biggest single issue raised here, perhaps, is whether this movie qualifies as a Women in Prison (WIP) movie. Some would argue, yes. Many would argue, no. Of this, there is no debate: there are women in this prison. But does women in the prison, a WIP movie make? At first, I was tempted to argue no because ultimately, it is not a women's prison (it is coed) and the women, though important to the plot, are not existentially related to the plot. This movie could have been made with an all-male cast fighting over territory or drugs, and it would have been possible to keep the general outlines of the story roughly identical. That said, the movie has a definite feminist narrative subtext, which ultimately makes it more of a kindred spirit to a movie like Caged Heat (1974) than to The Rock (1996). ("Say what? Feminist narrative subtext?" I can hear you asking. Yes, read on.)
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| Dr. Milford (a young and scruffy Tom Selleck) and Bunny (Barbara Leigh). |
This movie has a worse rep than it deserves. In part, this is because the movie has been repackaged a couple of times to take advantage of the fact that a young Tom Selleck stars in it. As a result, a lot of people rent this movie not quite suspecting what it is. But for me, who will watch a movie like Terminal Island sandwiched between Caged Women (1982) and Lock Up (1989), it really isn't so bad. Indeed, it has several moments of goofy fun. I have to admit I almost decided not to review this movie. Jason MacIsaac has a brilliant review of Terminal Island over at Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension, and I didn't want to seem like I was just repeating his comments. But then I watched it, and I just could resist writing up a review... in part because I think Jason was unduly harsh, frankly. Still, I recommend you check out that review first because it covers the plot in much more depth than I do.
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| The Expositron™ is in full gear above... but doesn't the boss look familiar? Who is he? |
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One of my favorite parts of this movie is the lengthy Expositron™ opening. Set in a TV studio, we get the whole story of Terminal Island through "man on the street" interviews, and clunky expository dialogue where characters tell each other things they must all already know. We even get introduced to the main characters by looking at their mug shots and hearing about their crimes. Why would a news crew have a whole bunch of mug shots of convicted prisoners? Who knows? Needless to say, the news crew featured in this scene never reappears in the movie. The opening is forced and cheesy, and yet it is somehow more appealing that the voice-over narration or scrolling text we see in a lot of other movies (including Carpenter's Escape From... movies). Just to summarize the main points: following the overturning of California's death penalty law by the Supreme Court, the voters pass the San Bruno Initiative which allows (mandates?) that 1st degree murderers be exiled to an uninhabited island, the eponymous Terminal Island. The characters are a Rorschach test of early 1970s fears: the murderer-rapist, the random psychopath, the revolutionary bomber, the nice girl who kills her parents, the cop killer, the charismatic murderer, etc. We'll discuss them in more detail as they appear in the story.
The Expositron™ is, in fact, just prologue, and now we get the opening credits which roll over an extraordinary bad and funny country-western song, "It's Too Damn Bad." I really think this has to be a parody. The Jabootu review quotes extensively from the song, so read that review for more details. The thing I think is funny is that there is a special credit for original music in the opening titles. You know, sort of like, "Original Score by John Williams," only here it's "Lame-Ass Music by Michael Andres." They even give credit (assign blame?) for the theme song which is sung by Jeff Thomas, who probably is a big star in Branson as we speak.
As the opening credits end, we meet our first main character, Carmen (Ena Hartman, who seems to have given up acting after this one... can you blame her?). Before being dropped off on the island, the guard reads her sentence again, and then declares her legally dead... which seems a bit odd. I mean, why declare her legally dead? As a matter of law, how can the state declare a living person dead, and how is such a declaration different from the death penalty in a legal sense? Still stranger, of course, is that ceremony of being performed at sea by some poor schmuck of a guard. I mean, shouldn't a judge of some sort be involved?
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| "Hmmm, a corpse... maybe this isn't going to be like Club Med after all." |
Once ashore, Carmen wanders the beach aimlessly. Now, think about it. Obviously, she wasn't just sentenced, so she's had time to think about how she might survive on the island, no? Wouldn't she go about trying to put her plan into effect right from the get-go, regardless of whether that meant seeking out the other inhabitants or hiding from them? Instead, she ends up making camp out in the open on the beach. She's surprised by the arrival of Doctor Milford (Tom Selleck!). She threatens to brain him. He wearily replies that she would be doing him a favor... hmmm, he's stuck on an island with dozens of murderers, you'd think someone might have taken him up on that kind of offer before. Milford's presence on the island doesn't make any sense. He plays sort of a junior Jack Kevorkian, and he's imprisoned for a mercy killing of a brain dead man, with the man's wife's permission. The man's father, however, presses charges, and Milford's colleagues testify against him (Why is that? Think Milford was "playing doctor" with the chief attending's wife maybe?). Okay, so let's assume Milford was prosecuted and convicted. Would that be 1st degree murder? I could see Milford losing his medical license, and even maybe doing a few years in a minimum security prison, but sending him to Terminal Island seems a bit harsh to me. I mean Kevorkian has offed, what, about 50 people, and he was only convicted of 2nd degree murder.
Carmen and Milford rap (i.e. 1970s lingo for talk) for a bit. She asks him how many people are on the island. He replies that there were 70, but only 40 are still around. She then asks him, absurdly, what the deal is with the corpses she saw in the water. Hey honey, I'll give you one guess. Then she asks how many women are on the island. He replies, "not enough." Okay, now, although Milford is a bit cryptic here, Carmen should figure out his meaning. Still from my perspective, I think he was being pretty vague. I mean, could there ever been enough women on the island? How many would be that be? How many would be too many? Have I ever mentioned to you my fantasy about being stuck on a deserted island with the Rockettes?
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| The matching shorts are a nice touch. Bunny, Lee, Joy, and a random con. |
Anyway, Carmen wakes up the next morning alone on the beach. Apparently Milford slipped away in the middle of the night. She packs up her stuff and marches right over the ridge toward the camp of killers. You know, the one where Milford said there weren't enough women. Apparently Carmen wants to do what she can to even things up. She walks into camp. Ominously, all the men stop working and leer at her. Even more ominously, when she does see some women, they're all dolled up in short shorts and tight tops. Carmen, as a black women, completes the ethnic mix, joining blondes Joy (Phyllis Davis, who will make another appearance on this site when I review 1972's Sweet Sugar) and Lee (Marta Kristen, Judy Robinson from TV's "Lost in Space"), and brunette Bunny (Barbara Leigh, who also starred in the blaxploitation classic Boss Nigger in 1975).
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| Monk stepping on Carmen's head, thus symbolizing the oppressive power of the existing patriarchal order... |
We also meet the main bad guys at this point, the quirky Bobby (Sean Kenney, who, if IMDb is to be believed played the crippled Capt. Pike in The Menagerie episodes on the original Star Trek... I'm not sure I believe it.) and his enforcer, the muscle-bound Monk (O.J. confidant and future Magnum P.I. co-star Roger Mosley). For some reason Bobby and Monk have been expecting Carmen. Indeed, just before she walks into camp, Monk says, "the new bitch ought to be here any minute..." How did they know? Anyway, Carmen tries to play it cool, but Bobby orders Monk to "break her in." The expected rape does not materialize, however, and instead, Monk just slaps her around a bit and then steps on her head (!).
It turns out that, gasp, the women are treated like chattel (who'd have guessed it?). They're made to work at hard labor in the fields, cook meals, wash clothes, and at night forced into sexual servitude. Jason at Jabootu expressed horror at the cavalier attitude the movie has towards the women's plight, in particular, the way the women seem to regard their nightly "rapes" as inconvenient rather than horrifying. At the risk of reading too much into this movie, I think that misses the point. It seems quite clear to me that the movie, actually, is making a commentary on the institution of marriage. I mean, the movie's portrayal of the women's role is, in fact, a stylized version of the then-current feminist critique of marriage as depicted in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and elsewhere. Indeed, although some of the men in Bobby's camp are also shown slaving away, Bobby and his immediate circle tend to do a lot of supervising and planning. In short, Bobby is a white collar manager, with a cushy desk job, and the women represent the oppressed wives, killing themselves around the house, and then subjected to sexual servitude for the man's pleasure. By contrast, and here I am getting ahead of myself, once the women are kidnapped/freed by the rebels later on, they move into a world where the men share in the work (including the cooking) and the women have sexual freedom to choose their partners, and indeed to experiment with different partners with no consequences. Needless to say, the defenders of the patriarchal order react violently to defend their right to subjugate women, but in the end the rebels and freedom win out. When Doctor Milford at the end of the movie turns down a chance at a new trial in order to stay on the now-reformed Terminal Island, he is stating his preference for this new system over what is happening on the mainland where presumably the struggle continues. Fundamentally, the movie's claim is that women's liberation yields a better world for both men and women.
| ... and in case that wasn't clear enough, the women also have to plow, cook, and do laundry. |
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This interpretation of Terminal Island as a closet feminist narrative may seem like a stretch. After all, isn't this just a cheesy exploitation movie? I'd say no, and I think I can back it up with four arguments: (1) Director Stephanie Rothman was (a) a woman, and (b) a director who liked to interject political commentary into her movies. She's actually trawled the waters of relationship politics before in Group Marriage (1972) and even in the more clearly exploitative Student Nurses (1970) she makes one of them a political activist. (2) The movie is quite discreet about its exploitative elements. No rapes are shown on screen. The nudity is brief and relatively tastefully presented. Think about the scene I described earlier with Monk and Carmen. Do you think it was an accident that he throws her to the ground and steps on her rather than raping her? (3) The women are shown, above all else, as having special practical skills. Joy can shoot a mean bow. Lee can make grenades out of a canteen and local rocks. Carmen knows how to distill curare from plants. They aren't just stock characters whose contribution to ethnic diversity is more important than their contribution to the plot. (4) The women hold their own. They fight as well as the men, and are, on the whole at least as brave. One of the less appealing sides of early-1970s exploitation films was the way women were routinely punished for their rebellion. Even the relatively tongue-in-cheek Big Doll House (1971) ends up with all the main characters either dead or recaptured. Here it is quite the opposite, since the women now establish a women-friendly society. The women win here.
Whew. I've gotten way ahead of myself plotwise, so let me go back for a moment. Carmen arrives at the camp. Monk asserts his dominance. She meets the other gals who teach her the facts of life in the camp. All things considering, the establishment of this camp is quite an accomplishment. Think about it, just a few months earlier 70-odd 1st degree murderers were dumped on an island with minimal supplies. They manage to build a village and start farming. Yeah, sure, the social order they establish is oppressive to women, but hell, they are staying alive under difficult conditions. Remember, our Pilgrim Fathers nearly starved to death on arrival in the new world, and they had planned in advance, bringing seeds and animals and so on. Plus, they were much closer to the soil than your average 1970s murderer. And heck, for that matter, the social orders the Pilgrims established was hardly friendly to women either. So, for all the gnashing of teeth over Bobby's leadership, he's apparently a better leader than John Carver. In some ways this explains why Bobby manages to run things despite physically slighter than most of the other guys in the camp. Presumably over the first few months on the island, Bobby's followers survived, while everyone else died.
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| The "rebels" pause for a group shot before the final battle. Wouldn't this make a great poster? |
The movie's plot really kicks into gear one day when the women are at a small stream washing clothes. Suddenly, the group is attacked by a group of "rebels" who free the women from Bobby's control. The rebel group is led by cop-killer A.J. (Don Marshall). The other main members of the group are Easy (Randy Boone), Cornell (Ford Clay), and Dylan (Clyde Ventura). Easy is a dim good ol' boy. Cornell (he apparently left his buddies Dartmouth and Brown back on the mainland) is a black guy who always wears a fur-trimmed tunic. I mention that because in many movies, when there is more than one black character each gets a special distinguishing characteristic, such as a different outfit or a particular weapon or something, as if that were necessary to allow white audiences to distinguish between them. Dylan is a "doper-biker-killer-rapist" (as described in the Expositron™ opening; I like the way doper is first as if that were the worst of his crimes). Dylan's background is actually significant for reasons I'll discuss in a moment.
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| Joy cozies up to Easy... |
The women respond quite differently to this new situation. Carmen arms herself and hangs back, keeping an eye on things. Joy, by contrast, seems eager to make friends. Sitting around the campfire, she flirts shamelessly with Easy, to the point of unbuttoning her shirt, and then dropping a piece of chicken down his so she can go fish it out. Her behavior would be inappropriate even among a group of friends, much a less a gang of strangers comprised exclusively of killers... especially, male killers who haven't seem a woman in months. Well, needless to say, Joy and Easy soon head off to find a little privacy. After they consummate their apparently uncontrollable lust, Dylan shows up. Inflamed by Joy's lack of discretion, he pulls Easy off her and demands sex. Easy protests that Dylan should ask her permission, but Dylan replies that he hasn't had sex in three months, and that's that. He climbs on top of Joy, but her screams soon bring the others running. They quickly pull Dylan off her and chastise him.
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| ...then she bathes seductively while Dylan watches... |
The Joy/Dylan plotline hasn't run its course yet, however. The next day, the group splits up in small teams to make it easier to avoid Bobby's men who are trying to recapture the women and kill the rebels. At one point, we cut to a scene of Joy bathing in a quiet pond. We see Dylan approach. Joy sort of smiles at him seductively. She then steps out of the water, and slowly dries herself off and dresses. Then she sort of winks at him and beckons him to follow. He does, and once they find a secluded spot, he paws at her. She pushes him away, but starts to undress him. Once she has his pants off, she reaches into a bee's hive and grabs a big handful of honey, which she proceeds to rub on his, um, privates. Then she says, "shut your eyes and turn over." (Warden's rule # 112: Never, ever "shut your eyes and turn over." Please, just trust me on this one.) Anyway, Dylan fails to follow this advice. Joy rubs more honey onto his butt. Then, the payoff: Joy grabs a stick and beats on the bee hive. The angry bees swarm out and attack Dylan; we even get a lovely 2-3 second shot of bees landing on his ass. Dylan get up screaming and runs into the pond to avoid the bees, where by now the others have gathered to share a nice laugh at his expense. Although Dylan sneers at Joy, he doesn't seek revenge. Indeed, he seems to accept Joy's nasty trick as a reasonable payback for his attempted rape of her the night before.
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| ...thus setting up her revenge. Dylan screams in agony as the bees attack. |
I have a couple of comments here. First, this is obviously an absurd scene in its set up and execution. How does Joy reach into the hive to get honey? Why don't the bees attack her? How come Dylan doesn't get suspicious about the bees and the honey. Second, and more importantly, I find the message here quite intriguing. I mean, basically the movie is making a statement in favor of women's sexual liberation. Women, the movie is saying, should be allowed to express their sexual desires at any time and place without fear of negative consequences. Joy, in this case, is shown as being in the right, even though I think most people would agree that her overt flirtation with Easy at the campfire was indiscrete and unnecessarily provocative. What makes it all interesting here is that Dylan somehow comes around to accept this view. Now, just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that if Dylan had raped Joy, she would somehow have gotten what she deserved. But it is possible to say that a victim put him/herself in a dangerous position without excusing the crime. This theme is reinforced later with Carmen. Carmen first hooks up with A.J. Then a little while later she gets friendly with Cornell. A.J. walks in on them. He's clearly perturbed, but he walks away without comment. Here again, the message is clear: Women should be able to exercise their sexuality as they please and face no negative consequences. So if Joy wants to flash some flesh and flirt in front of a group of killers she barely knows, that's fine. And if Carmen wants to sleep with A.J. and then Cornell, well that is fine too, and A.J. should just get over that jealous possessiveness, man. In short, the movie is making a statement of early-1970 consequence-free sexuality. This time capsule look at early-1970s feminism is actually quite interesting in that sense, and makes Terminal Island more than simply exploitation schlock.
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| Hardly state of the art, but they are trying to make it exciting. |
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When the movie isn't making statements about sexual politics, it is usually stays in straight-forward b-movie action mode. The rebels decide to build weapons to defend themselves. Carmen brews up some curare for use in blowguns. Lee cooks up some grenades with some homemade gunpowder. We get a couple of hit and run skirmishes. These action sequences are hardly state of the art, but their clunky staging is at least partially offset by a fair amount of enthusiasm. I mean, guys leaps, jump, roll around, throw punches, and crack heads. The action sequences are certainly competent by b-movie standards... well, at least until the grand finale.
At one point, Bobby manages to recapture Bunny. He decides to use her as part of his master plan. Apparently, the authorities occasionally visit the island to drop off some supplies -- presumably medicine and some seed stock judging by the small boxes they drop off. The authorities seem to drop off these supplies at irregular intervals, presumably to prevent ambush. Taking a page out of the Professor's handbook from Gilligan's Island, Bobby has one of the other prisoners build a crude radio for him. Bobby intercepts a transmission from the picket ship on guard off the island. Now armed with information about the timing of the next drop, Bobby puts his plan in motion. Along with a small party of men, Bobby goes down to the beach. He ties up Bunny between two stakes, tears up her shirt, and flogs her with his belt. He leaves the bleeding Bunny on the beach and hides a few yards away. When the guards come with the supplies, one of them takes pity on Bunny and goes to cut her loose. As he does, one of Bobby's accomplices swims out to the boat, sneaks on board, and kills the guard. Now armed with the guard's assault rifle, the accomplice guns down the two remaining guards on the beach and swims back to shore. Bobby's plan, it turns out, wasn't to escape, but rather to get some guns. There are at least a dozen things wrong with this scene, but the Jabootu review does a good job of pointing them out, so I won't bother.
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| The evil Bobby whips the innocent Bunny... |
This all sets up the final showdown. After Bobby gets the guns, he heads back to the camp, apparently no longer interested in Bunny.... Indeed, as far as I can tell, now that he has the guns, all he seems to want to do is hunker down in his newly build stone storehouse/bunker. (It isn't clear why the village needed a stone storehouse to begin with, although it might have been a project Bobby dreamt up to keep everyone busy.) In the meantime A.J.'s group manages to get the drop on one of Bobby's men and take his gun. They also manage to find Bunny (who they sometimes call Rabbit... how sensitive of them). She ends up pairing off with Dr. Milford who has also joined up with them. A.J.'s group now decides to attack Bobby's compound. So, the two sides look like this: Bobby has about 30-40 men at his command, a couple of assault rifles (which the rebels insist on referring to as machine guns), and a stone bunker. A.J. group is comprised of 9 people with one handgun, and several homemade explosive devices including makeshift grenades and Molotov cocktails. It isn't clear why A.J.'s group decides to attack. After all, once they recover Bunny there isn't really any pressing reason to force an engagement... especially since Bobby seems to have forgotten all about the women and is content to just stay in his compound.
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| ...and gets burnt to a crisp for his sins. |
The final action sequence is pretty laughable. The most perplexing part of it is where all of Bobby's men disappear to. At one point as the climactic battle begins, Bobby's men rush the rebels. Cornell unloads his handgun at them, killed maybe two or three, but from that moment on, only Bobby and Monk seem to remain. Did the rebels manage to defeat them all in hand-to-hand combat? Did the other guys run off? Were they killed by Bobby's wild firing? Who knows. Also perplexing is why the rebels insist on attacking from the only direction that Bobby is prepared to defend. Bobby's bunker seems to only have one opening out of which to direct fire, but the rebels never think to attack from the rear. In the end, several of the rebels get killed, but Dr. Milford manages to pour gasoline into the bunker through the bunker's own water system. With a flick of a match, he sets the bunker aflame, burning Bobby to a crisp and blinding Monk for life.
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| The movie also features some of the most inept gunshot effects you are likely to see. |
The movie ends with the rebels having taken over the village, and apparently living in glorious, feminist peace. Joy is pregnant with Easy's baby. On the beach Dr. Milford runs into some guards who ask for him, but he pretends to be someone else and that Milford is dead. After all the island is now his home. The message is that women's lib also frees men. Get it? The only real imprisonment comes from being trapped within the oppressive constraints of patriarchy. Once liberated from that, even a prison become freer than the outside world. This quaint philosophy give Terminal Island a certain time-capsule appeal. But even beyond that, it isn't really an awful movie. The action is pretty lively, and only really absurd at the very end when the movie's reach exceeds its grasp in sustaining a large action sequence. We get the fun of seeing past and future celebrities (most notably Kristen and Selleck) in a cheesy b-movie. Add in a little nudity (notably from Phyllis Davis who is a very attractive woman), and voila, 80 minutes worth of entertainment. Give it a try.
(3.5 out of 5)