Cellblock Sisters

Cellblock Sisters

United States – 1995

Director – Henri Charr

PM Entertainment Group, 1995, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 35 minutes

Instead of simply placing an innocent girl in corrupting circumstances to see what happens, Cellblock Sisters takes two effectively identical girls, and proposes an answer to the age old question of nature vs. nurture. By taking two sisters separated by a year or so in age, and subjecting them to different upbringings this mocie asserts that it is strictly environ mental factors that turn a woman into a beast. In posing this question however, there is an unspoken assumption of what a woman should be.

While still infants, sisters April and May are sold off by their mother’s drunken biker boyfriend Sam. Their mother, a hillbilly junkie with a terrible fake southern accent agrees at first, thinking the girls are only going to a home until she can clean herself up. Well after the girls are gone, she realizes what has happened and attacks Sam who “accidentally” kills her. Over the next sixteen years, each girl is raised in a completely different environment by their foster parents. May has been living in England, a place normatively associated with propriety and a particularly ordered domesticity. As such, she is quickly identified as the protagonist because she has idealized feminine qualities: the innocence, virginity and most importantly the potential. She is as yet unspoiled and thus her future unwritten.

Her sister April on the other hand has spent the intervening years in Los Angeles, the iconic lawless border town in the tradition of the U.S. western. It is the quintessential metropolitan metaphor for vice and corruption. During her upbringing it is insinuated that her foster father sexually abused her. Eventually, years later after killing him, she continued a life of violent crime and now pushing a whopping 18 or19 years old, is the leader of a gang of cheap biker thugs. Because she was irredeemably “tainted” as a child, we know that she can have no future to speak of. We rejoin the sisters just as May, wearing a white skirt and jacket, arrives in Los Angeles to see her long lost sister for the first time.

It is here that May finds herself spiraling into corruption almost as soon as she meets her sister. One of their fist moments together is at the gang’s party shack where April presents May with a black leather jacket, “my leather jacket, now it’s yours.” Thus May’s innocence is symbolically tarnished by association with her sister’s tough and dark character. The corruption continues when April takes May to murder Sam, the father who sold them in the film’s opening minutes. April flees the scene of the crime, but May, tormented by the need to know where Sam buried their mother, stays behind with him as he dies and is subsequently sent to prison for his murder.

To The Limit

To The Limit

United States – 1995

Director – Raymond Martino

PM Entertainment Group, 1995, VHS

Run time - 1 hour, 36 min.

A cackling bald guy in a camo shirt completes a big deal with a mustachioed guy with a Russian, and then suddenly Mexican, accent. Bald guy cackles some more and then blows up the helicopter with the other guy in it. Balding Frank DaVinci (producer Joey Travolta, John's older brother who managed to land himself a discomforting sex scene with Smith) has a bachelor party at a strip club, and then at his wedding his wife is gunned down and he is grievously wounded. At the same time, wedding party guest and ex CIA Agent Colette DuBois (Anna Nicole Smith) is taking a long hot shower, and having sex with her husband (Michael Nouri of Flashdance). As they leave for the wedding, she forgets the present, and goes back in the house inadvertently saving herself from the fiery explosion of her husband and the car.

A bunch of mafia guys show up at the hospital to protect Frank from his 'Nam flashbacks and the cackling bald guy's sexy food coloring assassan. Frank yanks his fake hospital tubes out of his esophagus and splits for the Vegas scene. After drying her frightening and unnaturally large surface area in the second of three(?) shower scenes, Colette finds frank in Vegas and stutters him the information she and her deep-fried husband uncovered on Cackling Guy.

Smith's co stars are fascinated.

Back in ‘Nam, Frank and his buddies were running "Black Ops" in Hanoi and during the assassination of a double agent, a little girl got killed.

So, uh… I guess, Frank feels guilty and Cackling Guy likes to rub it in?

Colette is attacked by some ninja and heaves her considerable bulk around the room dodging gunfire and shooting back. She is out of breath. An asian girl takes off her shirt and kills some people, then there is a car chase, and, an explosion! Colette takes a bath. Suddenly – in dramatic, climactic tones there is, a clue!! A simple handheld snack composed of bread and spreadable condiments, a SANDWICH CLUE!


Cackling Guy's agrees to an exchange for a mystical golden disk of power, a CD with some pictures of Vietnam on it. At another equally exotic location, they meet up and in a fit of rage Colette hurls the CD Ninja style into Cackling Guys forehead with a bloody squish, and he goes tumbling over the side of the Hoover Dam, much like me, shrieking in doomed horror all the way to the sudden blunt stop at the end.