By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: sordid “women in prison” specialist Bily Fine, who produced The Concrete Jungle, Chained Heat and Hellhole.
Frequently in the Unsung Auteurs column, the issue of quality comes up, principally when relating to the “auteur status” of a filmmaker. To some, an auteur is a director who invests their deepest, most personal concerns and thoughts into every high-quality project they make, all done in a visual style that is instantly recognisable. To others, an auteur is a creative figure whose work not only resonates less obviously with a thematic and stylistic through-line, but that can also exist in genres not appreciated for their “quality”, like horror, action and sci-fi. In short, to our way of thinking, you don’t have to make “good” films to be an auteur; said films just have to be connected by only a minor sense of style, content and theme. To take this argument to its most extreme end-point, Edward D. Wood did not make “good” films, but they were sure as hell his films. If you ask us, the cinematic auteur can exist in any genre or environment, be it extreme action, major studio comedies, or the indie arthouse scene.
This brings us to the late Billy Fine, a producer of some of the most lurid, salacious and exploitative films of the 1980s. In fact, Billy Fine is most closely associated with one of the most prurient of all exploitation sub-genres: the “women in prison” (or WIP in cult movie circles) film. Churned out by drive-in specialists like American International Pictures and New World Pictures in the 1970s, films like The Big Doll House (1971), The Big Bird Cage (1972), The Hot Box (1972), Black Mama White Mama (1973) and Caged Heat (1974) represent a bizarre, uncomfortable duality in the world of exploitation cinema, featuring horrific scenes of rape and the misogynistic abuse of women, but also offering strong, front-and-centre female roles and often a powerful, late-in-the-game sense of female empowerment. Like the “rape-revenge” sub-genre, the “women in prison” film justifiably prompts much polarity and debate in the often-heady world of film commentary.
The “women in prison” film was pretty much, well, behind bars until Billy Fine busted it out in truly crazed fashion in the early 1980s. But first, the exploitation producer put together a fascinating slasher flick with a difference in 1980’s New Year’s Evil, in which a serial killer nabs a new victim when the new year hits in every time zone. To make matters even more entertaining, the murders are all tied in with a very early-1980s New Year’s Eve punk/New Wave concert featuring a roster of unknown-but-actually-pretty-good bands and an entertaining host/heroine in Roz Kelly’s Diane Sullivan. A curiously comical but well-made horror entry, New Year’s Evil showcased Billy Fine’s eye for unusual material. He displayed this again when he helped put together 1982’s Penitentiary II, the second entry in wild-man auteur Jamaa Fanaka’s bizarre prison-boxing-Blaxploitation series starring Leon Isaac Kennedy.
Billy Fine really sealed his admittedly minor reputation, however, with his next two films. Directed by Unsung Auteur Tom DeSimone, 1982’s The Concrete Jungle was Fine’s first trip to the women’s prison, as young innocent Elizabeth (Tracey E. Bregman) gets banged up when her sleazy boyfriend’s plan to use her as an unknowing drug mule comes unstuck. Once inside, Elizabeth has to toughen up quick when she’s confronted with violent inmates, predatory guards, an unfeeling system, and, worst of all, a nutso, deeply corrupted warden (a very wild Jill St. John, a one-time Bond Girl a million miles away from her glamorous heyday of the 1960s and 1970s) who uses the prison to run a drug and prostitution ring. Filled with all of the best and worst that the “women in prison” sub-genre has to offer, The Concrete Jungle is a deliriously lurid exploitation flick of the first, very seamy, order.
This nasty little shocker, however, obviously didn’t quite meet Fine’s deleterious demands, as the producer actually upped the ante with his next effort. This time tapping kindred spirit director Paul Nicholas (who had just previously helmed the nasty killer-teen flick Julie Darling), Fine produced 1983’s Chained Heat, an even more outrageous and sleazy “women in prison” flick. Ratcheting everything up to eleven, this exercise in delirious bad taste boasts Linda Blair as the innocent new inmate; the divinely statuesque Sybil Danning as the tough inmate who leads the white prisoners; Tamara Dobson (Cleopatra Jones) as her African-America opposite number; Stella Stevens (!!!) as the vicious lead guard; and John Vernon (!!!) as a warden so sleazy he’s got a hot tub in his office! Campy madness featuring lurid lesbianism, a drug and prostitution ring, nasty violence, high-pitched acting, and horrible sexual abuse, Chained Heat is the “women in prison” flick juiced up on steroids, and a near-camp career high for Billy Fine.
After a surprise detour into horror-fantasy territory with 1983’s The Alchemist (starring The Exterminator’s Robert Ginty), Billy Fine actually found a way to make the “women in prison” flick even more lurid with 1985’s creepy, seamy, banged-up nightmare Hellhole. Boasting another inventively crack cast of wonderful cult mainstays in Terry Moore, Mary Woronov, Robert Z’Dar, Edy Williams, Ray Sharkey, Judy Landers and the great Marjoe Gortner, Hellhole takes it to the next grotesque level by shifting the action from a women’s prison to a mental asylum, which features all of the “women in prison” cornerstones like violence and sex, but folds in salacious new wrinkles like drugs and medical/psychiatric experimentation. Hellhole is a singularly heady, freaky and often very ugly camp-fest…in short, it represents a fitting final work from the envelope-pushing Billy Fine, who passed away in 2002.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
