A riff on The Defiant Ones, Black Mama White Mama pairs Pam Grier with Margaret Markov as two squabbling prisoners who escape the prison bus and escape through the jungle.
Off the bat, the music for this movie is AWESOME. Harry Betts’ main title music makes this movie feel like the best seventies action movie ever.
This movie had a more efficient set-up than the previous women in prison movies but mostly the effect of watching four of these things in a row - in the space of half an hour we get the conflict between the prisoners, a food fight, lesbian wardens, and a hot box torture scene.
The chase antics are a little all over the place - I felt a dip in the film’s pacing as the film juggles our heroines with the rebels, the police and the mercenaries who have been hired to ambush them.
Familiar faces Vic Diaz and Sid Haig walk away with the acting honours although most of the cast are decent, in an earnest b-movie kind of way.
I like Sid Haig, but he gets so much screen time that the movie loses focus - and most of that subplot is based around him trying to have sex with everybody he meets.
The climatic action sequences are pretty effective in their staging - I like the setting of the docks for the finale. For once the action is not an endless intercutting of people shooting at screen left and right, and there is a bit of tension as the rebels are forced back toward the ship.
We get another semi-downbeat ending although this time the villains die in a massive explosion and the surviving rebels manage to escape. As though to sum up the whole endeavour, the film gives the final word to the antagonist. As he views the bodies of the rebels, the police captain delivers a final declaration, ‘12 years a captain. I’ll be a major before dinner’.
Between this movie and Women In Cages, you can feel the hand of filmmakers who understand the place they are working in - it feels like the casting, the performances and the scripting of the Filipino cast members are more fleshed out.
Compare Vic Diaz, who delivers a florid performance as the gay warden in The Big Bird Cage. Here, he is more subdued and frankly more intimidating. His lack of reaction when torturing a witness is genuinely chilling.
There is an underlying weight to Romero and De Leon’s version of the Women in Prison format that is missing from Hill’s work - Hill treats the conventions with tongue planted firmly in cheek, and the shooting environment is reduced to a cartoon paradise. Black Mama White Mama is not as relentlessly bleak as Women in Cages, but the setting does feel like a living place, while the government forces and the mercenaries do not feel like comic book villains.
It’s not the best movie I’ve seen in the genre, but Black Mama threads the needle between the depressing realism of Women in Cages and the more ridiculous world of Jack Hill.
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