Fugitive Girls (1974)

AKA: Five Loose Women, Hot on the Trail, Women’s Penitentiary VIII

Directed by A.C. Stephen (Stephen Apostolof)

Featuring Margie Lanier, Talie Cochrane, Rene Bond, Jabie Abercrombe, Dona Desmond, with guest appearance by Edw. D. Wood, Jr as Pop

‘Good Christ – A lesbian!’

Innocent Dee is thrown into prison after her no-good boyfriend shoots a man during a bungled liquor store robbery and leaves her to take the fall. Once in prison, Kat, the top dog amongst the inmates, forces Dee to submit to her sexual demands. But Kat also brings Dee with her when a group of prisoners make their escape. The five women evade their trackers, and as they flee they encounter hippies, fight bikers, hijack a car and hold a couple hostage, with their final goal being to find the loot that one of their number hid before going to jail.

This movie opens with a shot of a seedy looking neon hotel sign. The camera then pans over the interior of a garish 70s hotel room, clothes strewn across the floor. Next the camera moves up to reveal a hairy butt, thrusting away. Unfortunately, my long suffering partner walked into the room at this point – stunned into silence. He deals with this kind of surprise more often than he would like, I’m sure.

Zooming out we see a couple having very unconvincing softcore sex, with the man thrusting at what appears to be the woman’s knee, and with some really repulsive kissing going on. This opening really summed up for me the kind of classy picture this is, and set my expectations realistically low for the rest of the movie.

I watched this on a whim, without realising that this is one of the later films that Ed Wood made with Stephen Apostolof in the 70s. Initially, I thought the script was nowhere near as Wood-en as his classic 50s efforts, but the more I think about it, the odder this film becomes.

When Dee is brought to the prison, it looks like a cabin, sans fences, and with a colourful totem pole out the front. ‘Minimum security’ indeed! “Is this a prison or an Indian reservation?” my partner piped up. A less than ideal way of phrasing the question, but he makes a good point: this is not at all a convincing prison, minimum security or no. Throughout the scenes at the prison, not a guard or warden is seen, not even as the gang make their escape. It seems to lack guards, fences and other prisoners, all of which I would have thought were pretty crucial to the prison environment.

Interestingly, the structure is also quite different from your average women in prison flick. Instead of spending considerable time in the jail setting, covering the usual communal showers, catfights, sadistic lesbian wardens etc. etc., this film seems to spend about five minutes in the prison, with the majority of the runtime covering the fugitives’ run from the law – with occasional boring softcore sex scenes and extremely gratuitous nudity thrown in for good measure.

I won’t go into too much detail about the rest of the plot, except to mention a few of my favourite things about this film. The hippies that the gang encounter are totally ridiculous, particularly when one of the male hippies starts spouting off pompously about how they have rejected society’s values and cooking methods after the food they prepared is criticised by the fugitives. Secondly, Ed Wood plays a couple of small parts, as is particularly entertaining and ridiculous as an old man running an airfield. Thirdly, the ringleader Kat is a hoot –  needlessly aggressive, she runs around like a tiny dog that doesn’t realise how small it is, barking orders and coming out with constant hostile yet over-the-top one-liners.

All in all, I was pleasantly surprised at how entertaining this film was. Yes, it’s poorly made and pretty trashy, but it provides enough laughs to keep you watching.

Worth watching? Yes – it can be fun and engaging, in an off-key b-grade WIP kind of way.

Truth in advertising? I’ll give 5/5 for ‘Fugitive Girls’, but some of its alternate titles are somewhat less accurate.