Bad Girls Dormitory (1986)

... aka: Bad Girls
... aka: Dormitory Girls
... aka: Escape from Bad Girl's Dormitory

Directed by:
Tim Kincaid

Desperate to get away from her sexually abusive father, wanna-be actress Paige (Natalie O'Connell) answers an ad for an "art model" and ends up taking off her top for 150 bucks for a scumbag porn director. Next thing she knows vice cops are busting down the door charging her with "conspiracy to commit oral copulation." Streetwise Marina (Teresa Farley) unwisely accompanies her backstabbing loser boyfriend to score some coke and ends up holding the bag when the cops arrive. Before they even had a chance to turn a trick, best friend runaways Barb (Frances Raines) and Jennifer (Jane Donadio) were snatched off the street by the fuzz. What do these girls and many others have in common? Well, they're about to be stripped of their bras and forced to wear flimsy white t-shirts to spend some not-so-pleasant time at the New York Female Juvenile Reformatory, a place rife with corruption, drugs, lezbo guards, leering male guards, profanity, perversity, rape, suicide, murder, chain-smoking, deep cavity searches, pinball machines, coed showers and a rather unorthodox staff. Oh you know, the usuals!

Though it spreads screen time out pretty evenly between the girls, the closest thing to a lead here is Lori (Carey Zuris), who killed her horrible boyfriend after he arranged for his buddies to gang rape her. She has fun times in solitary confinement getting raped yet again by one of the guards and has (consensual for a change!) sex with the hunky newly-hired social worker (Rick Gianasi) in the showers. The volatile cell block bully is Lisa (Jennifer Delora), a masochist who actually arranges cat fights with a butch guard just because she enjoys being beat up! Lisa also goes a little crazy after she discovers her mother has died and starts slaughtering all the others (including garroting one with a wire till she's a bloody mess) and hiding their bodies in the boiler room. Her accomplice is a hilarious Southern bigot named Rebel (Donna Eskra), who sleeps with male and female staff members alike to get her drugs, but always follows with an insult like "You may be the worst lay I ever had in my whole life!"

You may be wondering just who the hell runs this place. Well, a staff of the most scuzzy degenerate creeps ever seen in one of these things, that's who! There's a racist lesbian nurse who gives girls drugs for sexual favors, laughs while watching an inmate being raped and looks at a black mother and hew newborn baby and says, "Just what we need, one more little negro!" The male guards are all ass-grabbing perverts who rape whoever they want whenever they want plus a heroin junkie doctor who's also screwing all the girls for drug favors. A European-accented female warden named Miss Madison (Marita) runs the place and all she really does is turn a blind eye to what's going on while recommending they all be put on "medicathon." Interestingly, her "experimental program" allows the girls to be able to come and go as they please and also allows their families and significant others to come and go as they please, which doesn't really explain why they start blasting the entire staff at the end with shotguns (including shooting a guy right in the crotch) since all they really have to do is just walk out the door.

This movie is extremely cheap-looking, poorly edited and utterly ridiculous from start to finish. The "prison" scenes seem to be filmed in a low rent apartment building, a flea bag motel and a warehouse. And the tone of this thing is all over the place. It hops from an image of a newly-defiled virgin's corpse hanging from the noose she just hung herself with accompanied by the sound of nightmarish moans to a side-splitting conjugal visit dance party in a kitchen where plump inmates in ripped-up tees chain smoke and dance around with their visitors to some Casio keyboard pop song called "Hose Me Down." There's plenty of violence and bloodshed courtesy of Ed French, and the nudity is almost nonstop. The camera pans and up and down bodies during the numerous shower scenes and there's equal opportunity flesh-baring from the guys; not surprising considering the director got his start in gay porn under the name "Joe Gage." I guess he was following in the footsteps of Tom DeSimone (aka "Lancer Brooks"), who'd made the R-rated WIP films Prison Girls (1972), The Concrete Jungle (1982) and the thoroughly awesome Reform School Girls (1986) in between all of his all-male X-rated flicks.

If you've seen your fair share of 80s shot-in-New-York-City trash cinema as I have, you'll recognize many of the actors from other films directed by people like Chuck Vincent, Lloyd Kaufman, Roberta Findlay and Gorman Bechard. Apparently Charles Band was so impressed by this ultra low- budget film, which did well on video and enjoyed frequent late night airings on "USA Up All Night," he decided to finance later Kincaid movies like BREEDERS (1986), Robot Holocaust (1986) and Mutant Hunt (1987), which were all released on Band's Wizard Video label with the "Too Gory for the Silver Screen" stamp of approval.

As you can probably tell from my murky screen caps, I viewed a VHS sourced print. Media Blasters / Shriek Show offer a better-quality version, though I actually kind of preferred seeing this in piss poor condition. It was... fitting.

SBIG

Breeders (1986)

... aka: Killer Alien

Directed by:
Tim Kincaid

New York City virgins (yes, New York City virgins) are being beaten and sexually assulted. The victims are rushed off to "Manhattan General Hospital" where Dr. Gamble Pace (Teresa Farley) notices they're behaving strangely and healing rather quickly. Then the ladies - in a trance-like state - start wandering off. Gamble, along with investigating detective Dale Andriotti (Lance Lewman) decide to get to the bottom of things. The two discover that an alien life form capable of inhabiting human hosts is out to knock up Earth women. Why? Uhh, I'm pretty sure they mentioned it at some point, and pretty sure it involved producing alien spawn to prep for a planet takeover, but the only thing I'm absolutely sure about is that I watched this thing just two days ago and hell if I can remember. Things do culminate in a memorably tasteless sequence where all of the ravaged females take an otherworldly spunk-bath in an alien nest (located in an abandoned subway tunnel) before getting group electrocuted.

BREEDERS is far from a good movie. Actually, it's pretty awful. There's almost no plot to speak of, the dialogue is often howling bad and most of the acting is wooden (some of the actors even trip over their lines). There are, however, plenty of highly variable make-up effects courtesy of Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated effects artist Ed French, including a very gory scene where a man's chest puffs, bubbles and bleeds, several different alien looks (a one-eyed mutant alien offspring and a bug-like alien with large silver eyes) and other fun / cheap fx stuff. There's also good-looking cast and loads of T&A provided by five different actresses. It also doesn't drag on as it clocks in at just 77 minutes. Many fans of 80's trash are likely to get some enjoyment out of this mess.

Director Kincaid had, as "Joe Gage," already made a name for himself in the late 70s / early 80s adult industry with his acclaimed "Working Man" trilogy; films which were novel for both dealing seriously with same-sex relationships and for the casting of masculine men. Apparently, after Charles Band [the uncredited executive producer] saw Kincaid's previous film, the women-in-prison exploiter BAD GIRLS DORMITORY (1984), he decided to finance further projects from the director, which lead to this, ROBOT HOLOCAUST (1986) and MUTANT HUNT (1987). All were released on the Empire label and were Wizard VHS release. After these and a few more releases, Kincaid returned to gay porn and continues in that arena to this day.

The film has many familiar faces if you've seen your fair share of 80s exploitation. Several of the virgins I'd seen in other films; usually ones shot in or near the NYC area. Frances Raines, who plays coke-snorting model Karinsa and treats viewers to a completely gratuitous nude aerobics prior to getting attacked (drug use and exhibitionism... hallmarks of an unsullied maiden!), had previously been in the slasher flicks THE MUTILATOR (1982) and DISCONNECTED (1983). Amy Brentano, who plays fashion photographer Gail, was the female lead in the haunted whorehouse flick BLOOD SISTERS (1986). LeeAnne Baker, a cute, short-haired blonde who portrays nurse Kathleen and is probably the most promising actual actress in this crop of babes, had a funny one-scene bit in PSYCHOS IN LOVE (1986) and got to headline her own genre film (playing a 300-year-old, six-breasted witch in 1987's NECROPOLIS) before throwing in the towel on film acting in the late 80s. Matt Mitler, who appeared with Raines in the aforementioned Mutilator and also had roles in DEAD TIME STORIES (1985), BASKET CASE 2 (1990) and others, is in just one scene.

As far as lead actress Farley is concerned, it's nice seeing a black actress in a lead role in an 80s horror film and she's absolutely gorgeous to look at despite sporting some helmet-like 80s hair, but her habit of blankly staring off-screen (presumably to cue cards containing dialogue such as "It's a case like this that make me want to kill every man ever born!") gets on one's nerves. Make-up man French also has a decent-sized supporting role here as a doctor, though it's made pretty clear that his true talents lie elsewhere.

The film has been released multiple times on video and on DVD (MGM distributing the latter), so it's not difficult at all to find... just don't confuse it with the other BREEDERS (1995), a British film boasting a nearly identical premise.

★1/2