"Reform School Girls" review

Reform School Girls (1986)

Directed by Tom DeSimone
Writing credits Jack Cummins Tom DeSimone

Linda Carol.... Jenny
Wendy O. Williams.... Charlie Chambliss
Pat Ast.... Edna
Sybil Danning.... Warden Sutter

A nice girl ends up in a woman's prison. Actually it's not really a prison but a reform school. Actually it's not really a school but one big room where all of the girls lounge around in their underwear and sleep on bunk beds. A hideous woman looks over them and tries to teach them that it's all about control. She has it and they don't. The nice girl starts getting bullied by a hard looking, hard bodied woman who sleeps in the bunk next to hers. How this woman, who looks like she's pushing 45, is still in a reform school is not explained. Sybil Danning shows up as the warden of the school but she leaves the day to day operation to the nasty, control-freak boss lady.

"Reform School Girls" is a letdown. The most important thing to know about this one is that Sybil Danning does not get naked. I found this to be shocking. She keeps her giant black jacket on throughout the entire movie. A buttoned-up Danning in a woman's prison flick? What the heck? It made me very sad. Danning does nothing in this one. No beatings, no torture, no nothing. Sitting on her hands is not the usual M.O. for a warden in a woman's prison flick.

Anyway, the rest of the movie can't save the Danning disaster. There are two or three shower scenes. They're nice in their own gratuitous nudity kind of way but these scenes are few and far between. The exploitation scenes were missing in action but we are treated to scenes of the girls taking care of the new kitten they've found. Wow. Great. "Reform School Girls" didn't have its heart in the right place. Woman's prisons flicks are about naked women suffering inhuman violence behind prison walls until they can't take it anymore. This movie just couldn't get with the program. It can be skipped.

SCORE: 1.5 out of 4 impossible to reform girls