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, plot and/or elements:
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—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
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“An illustrious individual remarks that Mrs. [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton is the salt, Anna Dickinson the pepper, and Miss [Susan B.] Anthony the vinegar of the Female Suffrage movement. The very elements get the “white male” into a nice pickle.”
—Anonymous, U.S. women’s magazine contributor. The Revolution (August 19, 1869)