Caged Heat (1974)

A very different look at prison life, released in the same year as The Longest Yard. We aren’t going to claim this low-budget Roger Corman production, also known as Renegade Girls, is a great film. But it is the debut of a very great filmmaker: writer-director Jonathan Demme would go on to make Silence of the Lambs, one of the best films of all time, and to repay Corman for his confidence by casting him in the role of FBI Director Hayden Burke.

Silence of the Lambs was also shot but Demme’s go-to cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto, who also shot Caged Heat.

Caged Heat is a cheap exploitation flick, sure, but it contains some Demme hallmarks: strong female protagonists, a strong sense of empathy for the characters, and social consciousness.

A 1975 New York Times story on the rise of “trashy” midnight movies concluded that it “does not set new standards of cheapness, violence or grossness, as most midnight movies seem determined to do. It is a film about women in prison that offers little more than some zippy music, a lot of bosom shots and a perverted prison doctor.”

High praise from the paper of record.