Reform School Girl

I don’t know who the intended audience is for Reform School Girl. It’s not as sleazy as your standard women in prison exploitation films. But it’s not like it subverts the sleaze for depth either. Reform School Girl has some interesting ideas, but none of them really pan out because the film lacks focus.

In the 1950s, teenage Donna lives with her sexually abusive uncle. On a date with a local bad boy named Vince, Donna is a party to Vince’s car theft and vehicular manslaughter. She is sentenced to a reform school for girls that’s part boarding school, part prison. While incarcerated, Donna becomes close to some of the other girls, specifically an inmate named Carmen Pena. The head of the school, Mrs. Turnbull is a former Olympic track athlete. Donna also becomes a favourite of hers for her running and now receives preferential treatment from Mrs. Turnbull. This is sometimes at the detriment of the other girls and Donna’s own ethical code.

There’s a chunk of this film in the middle where it’s actually not bad. The set up of Donna ending up in prison isn’t very good. The 50s pastiche looks cheap and the depiction of her abuse by her uncle lacks any sort of subtlety or empathy. But for a while there, the movie sorts itself out. There’s a focus on other inmates who are all given a chance to develop their own personality and subplots. As often in prison media, these characters are more interesting than our wonderbread white lead.

When the film falls off again is the extended lesbian scene between Donna and Carmen. Not immediately, the first few minutes of the scene were genuinely quite tender and sweet. Then it keeps going and we get from a furtive first kiss to obligatory nudity. And all I could think was I wonder if Harvey Weinstein was on set that day. This scene is followed by a mass nude shower scene. And after the nudity break, Reform School Girl basically becomes an underdog sports movie with Donna competing in a local track meet, representing the reform school.

The problem with the Weinstein company is you always have to wonder about their product’s morality. This goes double for their Dimension Cinemas label. Dimension Cinemas was always creatively bankrupt. Bob Weinstein ran the division as a way to make money, not art. I think this creative bankruptcy affected Reform School Girl. There are gleams of a kinder, deeper and more focused movie than the one we got. Of course, the other problem with Dimension Cinemas is that it’s where Harvey often stuck the actresses he sexually coerced with the promise of a film role. It’s known that on even bigger Miramax films like Frida, Weinstein would demand additional sexuality and often be on set to watch those scenes. Really, the best hope Reform School Girl has for avoiding all of this is if it was too small and unimportant a movie for either of the Weinsteins to care about.

Reform School Girl is not the worst or sleaziest women in prison film I’ve seen. But that doesn’t mean I recommend it. Hell, at least the straight-up exploitation films usually had a consistent tone. This movie feels unfocused, uneven and I have a feeling it was subject so some studio interference of the worst kind. The fact that I can look at it and think well, it could’ve been worse doesn’t mean the movie is good. It just means I’ve looked into the void of gross-ass movies and accept that this one is not the pinnacle of such things. Which frankly, does also make Reform School Girl pretty damn unmemorable.

Overall rating: 3.6/10

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