While the movie is no great shakes on a production or technical level, the screenplay for "Fugitive Girls" (the most "explicit" version of "5 Loose Women") pretty much lives up to the promise of the lurid, overheated copy on the poster. (Although only one of the girls could be considered a "victim" being violated. The other four characters are rough cobbs who actually do most of the violating. But this is a good thing, because otherwise you'd feel like a sex bully for watching)

It's got repeated shots of blank-faced women pulling off their shirts to reveal some pretty decent "racks". It's got lesbianism, and lesbian and straight sexual assault. It's got young women behind bars (for the first 10 minutes, anyway), young women on the run, and young women taking the Tura Satana route and kicking the crap out of the men who underestimate them. It's got bikers, hippies, counter-culture rebels, pot-bellied county deputies in sun-glasses, and other caricatures. It's even got Ed Wood Jr. In a couple of cameos playing (badly) a geezer who is so dumb he calls the sheriff on the phone not more than 10 feet from the gang while they fill up their stolen car at his gas pump.

It has exactly the payoff you were expecting at the climax, and then doesn't know when to quit and goes on for another 12-13 minutes (because apparently the director or Ed Wood always wanted to do "The Defiant Ones".) (This cost it a star or two). It has decent and terrible line readings sprinkled throughout (like a pizza with everything), often from the same performers, often in the same scene. It has some decent mood music - the same wocka-jawocka psychedelic funk rock you always get in a movie in this genre, but well mixed and usually appropriate to whatever's going on on the screen at the time.

In short, this is exactly the kind of "R" film you would expect to see at your local drive-in ( you would have hoped for better and more explicit, but knew you had to take what you could get.) So: 5 stars (because it really is a sleazy piece of trash), but thumbs up - because in spite of plot holes, cardboard characters, filming errors, and no budget, you can tell the director is not holding anything back.

(1974) Fugitive Girls/ Five Loose Women ACTION THRILLER

Produced, co-written and directed by Stephen C. Apostolof that has Paula (Jabie Abercrombe) who gets put in a women's jail facility after a set by her so-called boyfriend, and manages to escape with four other women to help her retrieve a stash of hidden cash. The four other women also includes Toni (Rene Bond(, Kat (Tallie Cochrane), Sheila (Donna Young) and Dee (Margie Lanier).

The movie got worse the longer it continued, for I did not care too much for the exploitation scenes as much as I cared how the characters are going to succeed.