15 Greatest Guilty Pleasure Movies Of The 1980s
5. Reform School Girls
Another thing that no cinematic guilty pleasure list would be complete without is a women in prison movie. The exploitation subgenre exploded in the 1970s, and offered particularly lurid thrills in the early days of home video.
While director Tom DeSimone's 1986 movie Reform School Girls is at least in part a send-up of the WiP genre, it still ticks all the boxes and delivers all the sleazy amusements of any of its ostensibly more serious forebears; and it's hard not to enjoy it, even if you're left feeling a bit ashamed of yourself for doing so.
Plot-wise, it's all you'd expect; we follow a new crop of inmates at a dilapidated juvenile prison, enduring a wide range of torments and humiliations at the hands of both the cruel staff, and their fellow young prisoners - and as tensions escalate, it isn't long before the girls wanna riot.
Naturally, we might wince at the supposed age of the characters, but it's readily apparent that there isn't a soul in Reform School Girls who isn't at least in their twenties. The most attention-grabbing performance comes from punk rocker Wendy O Williams, who was 36 at the time.
Seasoned B-movie actress Sybill Danning (also seen in Cannon's Hercules) takes a key role as the Warden, although Pat Ast largely steals the show as her lecherous and sadistic second-in-command Edna.
Viewers may be forgiven for not paying especially close attention to the performances, however, given the vast quantities of flesh on show. Even when we're not in the midst of one of the plentiful shower scenes, the inmates are constantly wearing little more than underwear; Williams spends the bulk of her screentime in a black leather string bikini.