If only Sugar Boxx were a faux trailer and nothing more, it might be something. Extended to a full-length feature, however, it loses a lot of spark … much like Robert Rodriguez’s own Grindhouse spin-off, Machete. Still, any purebred fan of the women-in-prison (WIP) film won’t hate himself for digging in, as this Boxx offers all of the much-reviled subgenre’s mainstays, sapphic ones included.
Cody Jarrett’s low-budgeter centers on Valerie March (The Hillside Strangler’s Geneviere Anderson, who’s prettier than the transvestite Christina Applegate the poster depicts her to be), a go-get-’em news reporter for WPNS (get it?). Wishing to expose the Sugar State Women’s Prison as the sex-and-slavery hovel it really is, Valerie longs to go undercover as a prisoner. Shortly after donning hooker getup, she gets her wish and lands herself behind its bars.
The hot-flashed hoosegow is the kind of place that houses the worst of the worst, where … well, let’s let the sexy Warden Beverly Buckner (Linda Dona, Future Kick) fill us in: “Life in this compound can be pretty damn hard unless you have friends. I’m talking about beatings, gang rape, dysentery.”
Check, check and check! Writer/director Cody Jarrett (Frog-g-g!) gleefully submits leading lady Anderson and her fellow actresses to much mayhem and misery before allowing them to achieve that much-desired revenge. As a result, Sugar Boxx is marginally violent, occasionally funny and aggressively stupid, while not fully being able to embrace its drive-in roots. Having little money certainly works to the movie’s advantage, as does Jarrett’s decision to fill supporting parts with Russ Meyer starlets Kitten Natividad and Tura Satana, not to mention veteran WIP director Jack Hill (The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage). That said, a little more creativity is required to pull off the pastiche/homage to the point where it looks as authentic as Jarrett no doubt would like.
I admired it more than enjoyed it, getting in step with its funky groove as it shimmied its way forth. In terms of silly-minded throwbacks of fightin’ foxy females, it’s not up to the titillating heights of, say, Bitch Slap, but for a mere 86 minutes, it will do. —Rod Lott