Caged Heat
 Promotional poster for Caged Heat | ||
| Starring | Erica Gavin Roberta Collins Barbara Steele Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith Juanita Brown | |
| Directed by | Jonathan Demme | |
| Produced by | Roger Corman Sam W. Gelfman Evelyn Purcell | |
| Written by | Jonathan Demme | |
| Music by | John Cale | |
| Cinematography | Tak Fujimoto | |
| Distributed by | New World Pictures | |
| Released | 1974 | |
| Runtime | 83 minutes | |
| Country | USA 
| |
| language | English | |
| Budget | $180,000.00 | |
| Followed by | None | |
Caged Heat (alternate title: Renegade Girls) is an exploitation movie from 1974 of the "women-in-prison" movie genre. Caged Heat was written and directed by Jonathan Demme for the New World Pictures company, headed by Roger Corman. Caged Heat stars the actresses Erica Gavin, Roberta Collins, Juanita Brown, Rainbeaux Smith, Desiree Cousteau, and Barbara Steele.
John Cale wrote and performed its soundtrack music, which features the guitar playing of Mike Bloomfield.
Two later features, Caged Heat II: Stripped of Freedom (1994) and Caged Heat 3000 (1995), made use of the Caged Heat name and the women in prison situation, but are unrelated movies.
The premise
The story of Caged Heat centers on the character, Jacqueline Wilson, who was played by Erica Gavin. Wilson is sentenced to a women's prison after her conviction on illegal drug trade offenses. Wilson, naturally, becomes associated with a group of her fellow female convicts, and they fight against the repressive policies of the prison's warden, played by Barbara Steele.
Critique
Caged Heat was Jonathan Demme's debut as a movie director. The movie producer, Roger Corman, thought that the content of his company's previous movies about "women in prison" was inadequate, hence he instructed Mr. Demme to create a screenplay and a script that would bring something novel to this realm of movie-making. However, Mr. Corman also wanted Caged Heat to retain most of the violence and nudity that the audiences for this genre had come to anticipate.
Demme introduced new aspects to Caged Heat, including taking a satirical approach and creating a sadistic female warden, instead of a male one. To a lesser degree, Demme also incorporated elements of liberal politics, feminism, and social consciousness into his screenplay. Because of all these new aspects in Caged Heat, and because of its position as Mr. Demme's first feature movie, some movie critics consider this one to be more interesting than the run-of-the-mill, women-in-prison, exploitation movies.
Further reading
- Bliss, Michael, and Banks, Christina: What Goes Around Comes Around: The Films of Jonathan Demme (1996): isbn 0-8093-1984-5
External links
- Review Caged Heat at the Internet Movie Database
- Caged Heat at All Movie Guide
- Rotten Tomatoes review
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