Recurring Plot Elements
Most women-in-prison films employ the same stock characters and formulaic situations which have since become cinematic cliches. Such scenes usually include:
- an innocent girl (or group) being wrongfully sent to a corrupt penitentiary or reform school run by a brutal and lecherous male or lesbian warden (who might also be running an inmate prostitution ring on the side)
- an extremely humiliating group strip search
- lesbian sex scenes between prisoners and the guards, or the female prisoners being raped (or forced into prostitution) by male guards
- female prisoners being sentenced to extremely humiliating hard labor (such as scrubbing floors or digging dirt holes completely naked)
- fights between the prisoners (sometimes completely naked in the shower)
- cruel beatings and punishment by sadistic guards
- female prisoners being sprayed by a firehose
The story usually concludes with a bloody uprising or escape sequence in which the villains meet with a grisly death.
Occasionally the "new fish" inmate is an undercover reporter investigating corruption as in Bare Behind Bars or a government agent sent to rescue a political prisoner (Caged Heat 2, Love Camp 7).
Read more about this topic: Women In Prison Film
Famous quotes containing the words recurring and/or plot:
“Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, and yet recurring inevitably, without a finale in nothingness—”eternal recurrence.””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)