Escape

The big doll house of post-exploitation cinema just got bigger with an excellent new wing in the survival revenge thriller Escape, written and directed by prolific British filmmaker Howard J. Ford. A ship is coming into a port with an empty shipping container that Andras (Sean Cronin) is expected to fill up with freshly kidnapped women to ship overseas as sex slaves. To make this happen, he deploys a handsome piece of bait named Jude (Louis James) to lure pretty women off by themselves for a chloroform facial. Tamsin (Ksenia Islamova) and Karla (Sarah Alexandra Marks) were enjoying a time at the beach; now they are in a cage. The same fate has met Lucy (Sophie Rankin), Robyn (Megan Lockhurst), Chloe (Tiffany Hannam-Daniels), and Annie (Hannah Baxter-Eve), who were having young and exciting times before ending up in a dungeon with armed guards.

“…these women need to find a way to get the hell out before the ship leaves.”

One of the girls’ mothers, Anna Carter (Angela Dixon), is wealthy and influential enough to get a team of law enforcement together, including Detective Leonard (Anthony Ofoegbu) and Agent Stephens (Marc Danbury), to try to locate her missing daughter. However, that takes time, and these women need to find a way to get the hell out before the ship leaves. The guards have strict orders from Andras not to damage the merchandise, as they cannot sell broken products, which would then require disposal. Refusing to surrender to a fate worse than death, the captives’ only chance is a path that will get bloody fast.

Back in 1998, I got to see Jack Hill and Sid Haig show a retrospective of their movies at SXSW, including their captive women movies, The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage. When I asked Hill about who wrote a certain standout line of dialogue in the movie, the Sid Haig quote, “I zap ’em. R-A-P-E, that spells zap,” the answer was a woman. Though credited to Don Spencer, Hill said a lot of the screenplay was written by the female story editor of the picture. It split my mind that the villains had been written so well due to identification against, not with, a formula I had seen used in punk rock but didn’t know existed in a sub-genre as disreputable as babes-behind-bars.