User Reviews

While the movie is no great shakes on a production or technical level, the screenplay for "Fugitive Girls" (the most "explicit" version of "5 Loose Women") pretty much lives up to the promise of the lurid, overheated copy on the poster. (Although only one of the girls could be considered a "victim" being violated. The other four characters are rough cobbs who actually do most of the violating. But this is a good thing, because otherwise you'd feel like a sex bully for watching)

It's got repeated shots of blank-faced women pulling off their shirts to reveal some pretty decent "racks". It's got lesbianism, and lesbian and straight sexual assault. It's got young women behind bars (for the first 10 minutes, anyway), young women on the run, and young women taking the Tura Satana route and kicking the crap out of the men who underestimate them. It's got bikers, hippies, counter-culture rebels, pot-bellied county deputies in sun-glasses, and other caricatures. It's even got Ed Wood Jr. In a couple of cameos playing (badly) a geezer who is so dumb he calls the sheriff on the phone not more than 10 feet from the gang while they fill up their stolen car at his gas pump.

It has exactly the payoff you were expecting at the climax, and then doesn't know when to quit and goes on for another 12-13 minutes (because apparently the director or Ed Wood always wanted to do "The Defiant Ones".) (This cost it a star or two). It has decent and terrible line readings sprinkled throughout (like a pizza with everything), often from the same performers, often in the same scene. It has some decent mood music - the same wocka-jawocka psychedelic funk rock you always get in a movie in this genre, but well mixed and usually appropriate to whatever's going on on the screen at the time.

In short, this is exactly the kind of "R" film you would expect to see at your local drive-in ( you would have hoped for better and more explicit, but knew you had to take what you could get.) So: 5 stars (because it really is a sleazy piece of trash), but thumbs up - because in spite of plot holes, cardboard characters, filming errors, and no budget, you can tell the director is not holding anything back.

After watching this cheap flick, there was one thing I was sure of. The protagonist's name -- Jabie Abercrombie -- is her real birth name. No doubt about it. I savor each syllable. It rings along my veins. And anyway, if you could make up a stage name, would you choose "Jabie Abercrombie"? As for any question about her figure, the mystery is solved in the first five seconds.

Innocent Abercrombie finds herself in the slams and four of her fellow inmates force her to accompany them when they escape. The cops are looking for them everywhere. A long segment follow them as they hustle through the brush of the scenic milieu of the California coast range. Aside from Abercrombie there are -- let me see -- a tough Negro, a Southern racist, a hard-as-nails lesbian, and a rather tall nonentity.

As they wobble through the bushes they first run into what seems like a Hippie love-in, in the middle of nowhere. They change their clothes and wobble on. Next, they reach a back road and flag down a Cadillac. They disable the driver, rape the half-conscious man, and steal his car. They gas up at an abandoned air strip tended by Ed Wood, who they knock unconscious. Then they run into five tough bikers. There is a brief fracas and the male Rat Pack is unconscious. Then they break into a farmhouse and take two hostages, and at that point they all seem to become lesbians and begin to molest the crippled farmer's wife. But why go on?

The direction is clumsy. If a pan happens to cross the camera's shadow, so what? The editor was on mushrooms. A conversation ("If we're going to get through this we'll have to bury the hatchet") is shown twice. As for the performances, nobody can act. You can act better than anyone in this film. I can act better -- HAVE acted better. My performance as a drunken gambler in the superb "Traxx" was lauded by at least one perceptive critic -- my mother.

Has anyone who claims that a movie is "so bad it's good" ever actually thought about that buzz phrase? A small budget is bound to be a hindrance to the story but the story itself doesn't need to be so eminently disposable. I doubt that a respectable movie like "Carnival of Souls" had much of a budget, or "The Little Fugitive." But they held a certain appeal for mature viewers whereas this seems designed for an audience of teen-aged kids at a drive-in, anxious to see bobbing bosoms before they get down to fogging up the windows.

A quintet of desperate ladies go on the lam after escaping from a prison work farm. The cops naturally give chase while the gals embark on a wild crime and killing spree.

Director Stephen C. Apostolof not only keeps the delightfully down'n'dirty story zipping along at a constant brisk pace and maintains a blithely lurid tone throughout, but also delivers several scorching hot soft-core sex scenes and oodles of tasty gratuitous female nudity. The leave-no-sleazy-stone-unturned script by Apostolof and Edward D. Wood Jr. certainly gives viewers their grubby money's worth: We've got the fugitives stealing filthy threads from a commune of low-rent dippy hippies, two babes rape a hapless male motorist, and there's even a lively brawl with a ferocious biker gang. Moreover, it's acted with gusto by a game cast of exploitation cinema regulars: Tallie Cochrane as vicious predatory lesbian Kat, Rene Bond as raucous racist white trash tramp Toni, Maggie Lanier as sweet innocent Dee, Jabie Abercrombie as the sassy Paula, and Donna Young as brash trustee inmate Sheila. Wood Jr. plays both a sheriff in hot pursuit and doddery old airstrip caretaker Pops. The robust combo jazz and funk score hits the get-down groovy spot. The vibrant color cinematography rates as another nice asset. A total scuzzy blast.