Reform School Girls (1986)

Reform School Girls is one of those gloriously shameless exploitation films that hurls subtlety out of the nearest prison window within the opening five minutes and never once looks back.

This is pure women-in-prison camp insanity cranked to delirious levels — a riotously over-the-top blend of sadism, sleaze, punk attitude, leather, soap-opera hysteria, and wonderfully quotable dialogue.

And honestly, it is impossible not to admire the sheer nerve of it all.

The story concerns a sweetly naïve young girl who is cruelly betrayed and abandoned by her sleazy boyfriend in the middle of a crime scene before being railroaded into the most grotesquely sadistic reform school imaginable.

This is not so much a juvenile detention centre as some unholy cross between a concentration camp, a punk nightclub, and a fever dream from late-night cable television.

The challenge for any inmate is simple:
stay sane,
stay alive,
and somehow escape in one piece.

Judging by the state of the residents, very few succeed.

Towering magnificently over the entire production is the unforgettable Pat Ast as the reform school warden from hell — an extraordinary creation who resembles some nightmarish collision between Ilsa, a New Jersey mob enforcer, and a deranged motivational speaker.

Pat Ast does not merely appear in this film.

She devours it whole.

Her performance reaches heights of camp so sublime that one almost suspects she wandered in from another dimension entirely. Every line reading becomes an event. Every speech sounds like a drunken sermon delivered moments before an electrical storm.

Her nightly announcements over the school loudspeaker system — delivered with grotesque relish — are among the film’s greatest pleasures.

Quite frankly, the film is worth watching for Pat Ast alone.

It remains astonishing that she did not appear in more movies because this performance deserves cult immortality. Last seen terrorising audiences in assorted Andy Warhol-associated oddities and exploitation productions, she achieves something approaching greatness here.

And the dialogue she is handed is magnificent.

“YOU’RE JUST A SHIT STAIN ON THE PANTIES OF LIFE!”

Cinema simply does not produce lines like this anymore.

The inmates themselves are an equally colourful assortment of psychopaths, delinquents, leather-clad rebels, punk caricatures, and gloriously exaggerated prison stereotypes. Leading the charge is punk icon Wendy O. Williams, whose presence alone gives the film an additional layer of demented energy.

Admittedly, Wendy perhaps appears slightly mature to still be incarcerated in a reform school supposedly designed for underage offenders.

At times one suspects some inmates may have been serving sentences since the Nixon administration.

Still, logic has absolutely no place in a film like this.

What matters is attitude.

And Reform School Girls possesses attitude in overwhelming quantities.

The film barrels from one absurd confrontation to another with complete confidence, piling on:

• sadistic wardens,
• lesbian gang rivalries,
• punk theatrics,
• melodramatic cruelty,
• shower-room intimidation,
• prison revolts,
• and enough camp hysteria to power an entire drive-in theatre for a month.

The remarkable thing is that despite being completely ridiculous, the film remains consistently entertaining because everyone involved commits so wholeheartedly to the madness.

Nobody here appears embarrassed.

Nor should they be.

This is exploitation cinema functioning exactly as intended:
outrageous,
tasteless,
energetic,
trashy,
and wildly entertaining.

A genuine camp classic and one of the great guilty pleasures of 1980s exploitation filmmaking.

And Pat Ast?

Absolutely unforgettable.

One of the true unsung patron saints of delirious cult cinema.