The Muthers (1976)

          Yet more women-in-prison sleaze from the Philippines, only this time with a modern-day-pirates angle, The Muthers does not merit any special mention in the areas of execution, imagination, quality, or taste. It’s a crude piece of work, with grungy photography, needle-drop scoring, and way too many beatings and executions and rapes. Within those narrow parameters, however, the movie more or less gets the dirty job done. It’s a live-action comic book for leering fans who dig bloodshed and smut, and it features two of the loveliest African-American starlets working the low-budget cinema circuit during the ’70s, former Playboy model Jeannie Bell and former beauty-pageant winner Jayne Kennedy, who later became a sportscaster covering the NFL. Given the predominantly black cast, The Muthers also qualifies as a blaxploitation flick.

          The picture opens on the high seas, where a pirate gang led by Kelly (Bell) plunders mercilessly. When Kelly learns that her sister has been kidnapped by slavers and thrown into a prison that’s used as a meat market for men eager to buy women, Kelly makes a deal with the government—she’ll break into the prison and expose the slavers’ scheme, in exchange for the sister’s freedom and a pardon for the pirates’ crimes. The plot is illogical and laborious, but seeing as how the prison is named “Get Out If You Can,” the intellectual resources available to the filmmakers were not boundless. Upon arriving at the prison, Kelly clashes with Serena (Kennedy), a glamorous inmate who avoids hard labor and physical abuse by serving as the warden’s live-in concubine. Will the ladies join forces and mount an escape? Have you ever seen a prison movie before?

          Considerations along the lines of acting, characterization, and style don’t matter much for a film like The Muthers, which is designed to generate as much titillation per scene as possible; as such, noting the ineptitude with which certain elements are handled seems pointless. Suffice to say that attractive women do lots of unattractive things, occasionally delivering badass one-liners. There’s also just enough tragedy in the storyline to lend The Muthers the faintest whiff of actual humanity—although that doesn’t detract, if that’s the right word, from the overall low-budget trashiness.

The Muthers: FUNKY

T.N.T. Jackson (1974)

A failed attempt to generate another female blaxploitation icon in the vein of Cleopatra Jones and Foxy Brown, this very short feature combines the worst elements of blaxploitation with the worst elements of Asian-themed martial-arts flicks. It’s two shitty movies for the price of one! Lovely Jeannie Bell plays T.N.T. Jackson, a young woman who travels to Hong Kong after her brother dies there under mysterious circumstances. Using her ass-kicking karate skills, she impresses members of the local underworld and learns that her brother was involved with heroin dealers including Charlie (Stan Shaw). T.N.T. seduces Charlie to get close to him and learn about his operation, and T.N.T. clashes with another female American in Charlie’s circle, pretty blonde Elaine (Pat Anderson), who turns out to be an undercover cop. (Rest assured that she’s a karate expert, too, just like nearly everyone else in the movie.) Over the course of 68 dull and grungy minutes, T.N.T. gets vengeance and upsets a far-reaching drug operation. She also gets naked repeatedly, as in an absurdly exploitive topless karate scene. (Watch for the continuity error during that scene in which her black panties suddenly become white for one shot.) Badly acted, cheaply filmed, sluggishly paced, and ugly on nearly every level, T.N.T. Jackson isn’t the worst movie of its type, but it’s a far cry from the Pam Grier-starring films it was presumably intended to emulate. While the story makes sense, more or less, the myriad karate scenes get mind-numbing very quickly. As for the cast, Bell is appealing if not particularly memorable, Anderson is sexy as her adversary-turned-ally, and it’s a bummer to see the sensitive actor Shaw stuck in a one-note role as a cocksure thug.

T.N.T. Jackson: LAME