| Vintage Pulp | Apr 16 2024 |
No appeal, no parole, no mercy, no hope.
Today we continue our journey through ’70s exploitation cinema with Jackson County Jail, churned out of the grindhouse factory known as New World Pictures. Plotwise, Yvette Mimieux plays a Los Angeles advertising exec who leaves her cheating husband and finds herself at loose ends, but manages to score a job from a friend in New York City. She decides to get there by driving cross country, but passes through fictional Jackson County, located somewhere in or around Texas (a geographical fact we learn from a news broadcast that provides a Dallas Cowboys update). She's railroaded into jail and raped by the cop working the graveyard shift. Afterward, Mimieux manages to brain him with a stool and escapes with the help of hardened criminal Tommy Lee Jones, who early in his acting career (and with that monobrow of his) was already capable of making lines like this sing: “There's nothing wrong with being a crook. Everybody's crooked. I never met a straight person in my whole life. Whole goddamn country is a rip-off. And everybody in it.”
Jackson County Jail is sometimes labeled a women-in-prison flick, but it's a bit different for a generally low rent sub-genre because Mimieux was an established star, thirty-four years old with more than twenty movies behind her. The credibility she lends the film changes little about its basic purpose—titillation mixed with violence and an indictment of hick culture. Simultaneously, though, the filmmakers definitely don't go to the extremes of other women-in-prison dramas, in which we've seen women hung up by their hair. There are some viewers, we suspect, who wouldn't consider this movie a women-in-prison flick at all. We're fine leaving it out of the conversation too. The jailbound portion lasts barely twenty minutes of what is perhaps more of an outlaw movie, complete with Jones letting fly with this response to being told the police will kill him: “That don't matter. I was born dead.” Whether women-in-prison, outlaw, or counterculture, that's a damned good line. And Jackson County Jail is a pretty good movie. It premiered today in 1976
TexasNew World PicturesJackson County JailYvette MimieuxTommy Lee JonesCliff EmmichHoward HessemanRoger CormanGene Cormanwomen in prisonposter artcinemamovie review
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 28 2008 |
Little known film gave us first known instance of overacting on a movie poster.
Despite the cinema-style one sheet, Tarantulas: Deadly Cargo was made for U.S. television. Claude Akins and a cast of b-stalwarts—including Dr. Johnny Fever himself, Howard Hesseman—give this one everything they’ve got. Sadly, they are saddled with a preposterous storyline and upstaged by their own promo department, which slapped together a poster that portrays most of the film’s salient plot points (storm, lightning, plane crash, nearby city, spider swarm, and so forth) without taking up 100 minutes of your life. Plus it’s got that giant, horrified head we haven’t seen the likes of since, er, ever. Art fun, movie not so much. Tarantulas: Deadly Cargo premiered in the U.S. today in 1977.
