Nightmare in Badham County (1976)

Director: John Llewellyn Moxey

Writer: Jo Heims

Composer: Charles Bernstein

Starring: Deborah Raffin, Lynne Moody, Chuck Connors, Fionnula Flanagan, Tina Louise, Robert Reed, Della Reese, Lana Wood, Ralph Bellamy, Leslie Albers, Denise Dillaway, Simpson Hemphill

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Where Innocence Is a Punishable Crime

Plot: Two UCLA coeds have engine trouble in small Southern town. When they spurn the local sheriff's advances he arranges for them to be taken to the women's prison on trivial charges (the judge is a cousin), where they must endure atrocities at the hands of the administrators of the prison and the prison guards.

My rating: 6.5/10

Will I watch it again? No.

Wow.  Who would have thought that a Women In Prison (WIP) TV movie would be pretty good?  There was an R rated version released overseas (the one that I watched) that added swearing and nudity.  How about those prison guard uniforms?

Nice.  A lot of the Southern accents are atrocious but that's not why you watch these things.  The drama is pretty solid with a nice downbeat ending. Probably what I liked most was how wronged the girls were and how much it looked like they'd never get out of the prison farm. It was neat seeing some familiar faces in the cast, too.  Connors, for one, plays a mean sonofabitch sheriff that can't take jokes and rapes his female prisoners.  He's got a taste for the brown sugar.  I didn't even recognize Tina Louise (Ginger from GILLIGAN'S ISLAND).  Geez, I just noticed she's going to be 80 in 3 months.  Even though there is an R rated cut out there it's not nearly as sleazy as other WIP films of the 70s but it is one of the better ones.  Tits and swearing or not, it's one of the better examples of the genre.