The Hot Spot Rating
Reform School Girls (1986)
Cast: Robin Watkins, Linda Carol, Wendy O. Williams, Pat Ast, Sybil Danning, Charlotte McGinnis, Sherri Stoner, Denise Gordy, Laurie Schwartz,
Director: Tom De Simone
Synopsis: Twisted, sadistic and hysterically funny prison drama
“misfire spoof ” Psychotronic Video Guide
“comic strip style spoof of women’s prison films” Maltin
Reform School Girls is an insane, shameless and hugely enjoyable chick prison flick with all the genre stereotypes and much more. A young, naive innocent is duped and dumped by her boyfriend in the middle of a crime scene and gets it in the neck by being sent to a sadistic reform school from beyond hell.
The trick is to stay sane, alive, and somehow get out of the hell hole in one piece – no one seems to have done so, and it’s hardly surprising. The Warden is a cold, Ilsaesque butch-dyke from hell via New Jersey with a taste for spouting post-dinner sermons over the school’s speaker system.
The Warden is worth watching the film for several times alone; Pat Ast, last seen in the Warhol – Allesandro movies, towers over proceedings with a performance that reaches the most delirious heights of camp.
She is unforgettable and provides one of the great performances of modern cinema. What a phenomenal actress, such an enormous pity that she seems to appear in movies every twenty-five years or so!
Among the inmates are an assortment of psychos and typical hard prison fodder. Leading the pack is queen lesbian Wendy O’Williams, who at 55 is perhaps a touch elderly to be stuck up in a reform school for underage offenders!!
It shows you that it is almost impossible to leave the place alive once committed. It is a great camp classic, enormously enjoyable and ridiculous beyond belief. Pat Ast is an instant all-time great and deserves to be seriously worshipped and delivers unbeatable lines such as “You’re just a shit stain on the panties of life!”—fabulous, demented stuff of epic proportions.
