A long while back I promised something. And later promised it again. If you dig through the .plans you’ll find the promise. But I’ll save you the trouble…
Women in Prison: The Greatest Movie Genre EVER!
And that’s no lie.
First off, let’s start with the usual movie genre classifications: Action/Adventure, Horror, Drama, Comedy, Documentary, etc.. you know them all. Now, some people might say that Women in Prison isn’t a movie genre, but a style, or a common plot device. To them I say, “Bah! Shut up!”
Second, what makes a Women in Prison movie different?
Well, we can start with the setting, a women’s prison. And the cast.. there is always a warden, and they come in two types: hardened badass and pushover. Then there is the head guard, often male, who is almost always the opposite of the warden, either on the surface or deep down where it counts. If the warden is hard, the head guard is soft, and vice versa. There is always the naive prisoner, many times the main character, and there is always the time hardened evil prisoner. Most times there is also a wisened “been around the block a time or two” prisoner to help the naive one find her way.
Beyond the setting and cast, the stories themselves can be quite diverse. A Women in Prison movie can be an action flick, a drama, a horror film, a comedy, a documentary, etc… you get the idea.
Oh, and lets not forget the shower scenes, forbidden love, forced encounters and all the other things that make these movies GREAT for first dates!
And I’m not the only one. Check out this site about prison flicks. They have a good section on Women in Prison movies.
Beyond this however, there are quite a number of essays out on the net (I’m not posting links, cause some of it is really disgusting and I trust if you really want to see it you can find it yourself using Google or some other search engine) that actually point out that these sort of Women in Prison movies, made by men with all the sex and stuff, are actually more accurate a depiction of prison life for women than those movies that portray every woman in the slammer as a single mother trying to do right by her children while learning to be a productive member of society and sharing knitting secrets with her fellow inmates.
Anyway, I still hold, and probably will until my dying day, that Women in Prison is the single greatest film genre ever. Or, as the author at the link above says, at least that’s what I’ll continue to tell all my friends and family when they catch me watching them.