Caged Fury (1990)

Caged Fury opens with a scantily clad inmate escaping from her cell through a tunnel whose entrance is concealed by a poster. This is not a reference to The Shawshank Redemption, though after watching this women-in-prison flick I can say, like Andy Dufresne, that I crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side. The girl’s soon recaptured, although how, where, and when remains as big a mystery as the logistics of her escape — and it doesn't really matter either, because we're never going to see her again. The real heroine is Kat Collins (Roxanna Michaels), a young aspiring actress on her way to Los Angeles from Utah. Kat picks up Rhonda Wallace (April Dawn Dollarhide), and the two stay at Rhonda's on-and-off boyfriend Buck Lewis’s (Blake Bahner) apartment. The three go to a bar and watch The Zeros (a glam metal band so obscure they don't even appear in The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years) play. Also on site are Victor (Erik Estrada) and his friend Dirk Ramsey (Richie Barathy). Victor is stressed "because this asshole biker I've been trying to find has been shaking up a friend of mine." Dirk warns him that "you can't go around fighting everyone else's battles," only to, in a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do scenario, more or less spends the rest of the movie fighting Victor's battles for him. That same night they rescue Kat from a gang of horny bikers. Barathy doles out a rather rigid brand of martial arts, but at least as far as I can discern it’s him doing it; conversely, Estrada's style is to throw punches at the camera, let his stunt double and the editor do the heavy lifting, and then take the credit. Buck gets Kat and Rhonda an audition the following day, but when the girls realize it's for a role in a porn movie and try to leave, an altercation ensues; the two are arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison in record time. Obviously there’s something fishy going on, but what’s really happening is so incredibly stupid that I'd better let one of the villains explain it: "Our international clients watch casting tapes and then make shopping lists. We frame girls from out of town. We send them to a prison movie set to break their spirits. But best of all, most girls think they've done something disgustingly painful [sic]. So the idiots tell their parents and their boyfriends that they are going to leave the country to work on a movie. It's fucking beautiful, nobody's looking for them, there's no missing person report, and if some family in the Midwest decides to check her out, where would they look, Mexico? [What about the people, the courtroom, what about all those people?] Now Kathryn that's the part you should've guessed. You see the judge ... the district attorney and me, we are all actors." So unnecessarily complicated, but we are in Hollywood after all. Literally. When the girls break out of “jail” — thanks solely to Dirk, who single-handedly defeats all the “guards” without the help of Victor, who in turn doesn't even have enough reflexes to dodge a bullet fired by Bill Gazzarri , aka “the godfather of Rock 'n' Roll,” who even then had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel —, they emerge right on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across from Grauman's Chinese Theatre. It's like the climax of Blazing Saddles except that the characters in Caged Fury aren’t lucky enough to escape the bounds of the movie itself. Once again Victor, conveniently recovered from his injury, makes an appearance just in time to steal the credit. “I can't believe you're here,” Kat tells him; “I'm glad you cared”. He, in turn, shamelessly replies: "Hey, I care more than you think." More than Kat thinks turns out not to be enough to follow her when she returns to the "prison" to rescue Rhonda, who has been left behind; the cynical coward waits for her outside — or, rather, doesn’t wait; when Kat is eventually taken away by ambulance, Victor is again conspicuous by his absence. And yet Caged Fury ends up with a shot of the two happily riding his motorcycle — well, at least he’s not a bigamist, like in Dos Mujeres, un Camino.