Review for Black Mama, White Mama

If you’re a fan of cheesy 70’s exploitation films then you’ll thoroughly enjoy ‘Black Mama, White Mama’, despite its many short-comings by any other yard-stick. It’s certainly not as exciting a watch as either ‘Coffy’ or ‘Foxy Brown’, the Pam Grier vehicles that followed. But with its ’women in prison’ first-act and its ‘women in chains and on the run’ second act, it has enough politically incorrect sexploitation frisson to raise even the most jaded brow.



Filmed in the Philippines, it throws more than a passing nod at Roger Corman’s ‘The Big Dolls House’ and ‘The Big Bird Cage’, released just before this and which bear a striking resemblance. Box office, not originality, was what counted in the Drive-In era.

Pam Grier starred alongside Margaret Markov in a grindhouse spin on Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones, fusing the Women in Prison film with the emerging Blaxploitation movement for a riotous romp of bullets, babes and blood.


Lee (Grier), a tough prostitute and Karen (Markov), a revolutionary, are admitted to a tough women's prison where the guards (all ladies) like to take their pick of the girls. But Grier is not for the taking and it’s not long before she’s forced to do some time in the Hot-Box - an airless steel container where she gets pretty hot and steamy with Karen who is also under a disciplinary. Cooped up they soon clash, two spirited ladies thrown together for all the wrong reasons.

Packed off to a maximum security prison, their transport is ambushed by Karen's guerrilla friends and the two escape into the Filipino jungle. Chained together and with different ideas of what an escape might entail, Lee is only interested in retrieving a pile of stolen cash and getting off the island whilst Karnen wants nothing less than a revolution.



Escape isn't easy as they come up against a series of obstacles including a corrupt cop, a bounty hunter, a sadistic Drug Lord and guerrillas who threaten to turn everything upside down. Chock full of girl fights, gun battles, nudity and humour, Black Mama White Mama, which was also known as Women in Chains and Hot, Hard and Mean, lives up to all its titles.

It also features Sid Haig (Spider Baby, House of 1000 Corpses) who appears often with Grier in this period, as a cowboy bounty hunter and Lynn Borden (Frogs, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry) as a lesbian guard from a script co-written by Jonathan Demme (Caged Heat) and a score sampled by Quentin Tarantino for Kill Bill.



The Blu-ray looks great - it’s clean, it’s bright and crystal clear, though it should be remembered that this is a low-budget 70’s b-movie, not an IMAX presentation.

As is standard with Arrow, regardless of the gravitas of the release, it comes with some fun contextual extras including contemporary interviews with Markov, who looks in remarkably fine fettle considering the 40+ years since original release, and Sam Haig, who doesn’t. But then he never did, which was kind of the point.

There’s an archival interview with Romero as well as a full length commentary track with Australian filmmaker Andrew Leavold.



Whilst ‘Black Mama, White Mama’ is not one of Grier’s best of the era (check out ‘Coffy’ or ‘Foxy Brown’ for that) it is, nonetheless entertaining and a rather good time capsule for an era when such things were made without a trace of post-modernist irony.