The Worst of Netflix: Lust For Freedom

Every week, I scour Netflix for a movie rated at one star and put it in my queue, suffering through it for your entertainment so that you don’t have to. In the past, I’ve taken on anime cancer demons, softcore Iraq War porn and racist ventriloquism, and this week, it’s a Women-In-Prison flick that makes Shawshank Redemption look like Caged Heat 3000.

LUST FOR FREEDOM (1987)

Starring: A surprisingly small amount of nudity.

It’s been a while since the Worst of Netflix has taken on straight-up softcore porn, and while I’m not sure that anything could match the sheer “why on Earth does this exist” nature of Tomcat Angels – the skin flick set against the sexy backdrop of the Gulf War – Lust For Freedom makes a pretty good bid at becoming the least appealing use of naked women in cinema history.

Released in 1987 by our old friends at Troma, Lust For Freedom is an exploitation movie that approaches exploitation like a remorseful alcoholic.  It does its level best to shy away from anything titillating until it can’t hold out any longer, downing a six-pack of shower scenes and lesbian makeouts before waking up, feeling bad about what it’s done and vowing that it’s only going to stick to the boring, halfassed attempt at a plot from now on – or at least the next half hour.

Said plot revolves around foxy young Gillian Kaites, a ladytype police officer for whom “undercover” translates to “under a truly merciless wig”:

In what has to be the worst idea in police department history, Gillian is teamed up with her fiance and sent in to bust a Tony Montana stand-in named “Jonathan Troma” (cool self-reference, bro!) and since they’re three days away from their wedding and this is a movie that’s only ever sort of heard of originality, you can guess how that ends.  According to Gillian, “Cops were dying all over the place and all I could do was act like a woman,” and seriously, Academy Awards?  You picked “Moonstruck” over that for Best Screenplay?  Ridiculous.

Distraught and womany, Gillian flees her responsibilities and ends up (of course) getting framed for drug trafficking and hauled into a police station that, like all government buildings, has been decorated with framed pictures of Muhammad Ali and the Hindenberg:

You can’t see it in the picture above, but I swear to God, they’ve also got their first dollar framed up on the wall.

But maybe that’s on purpose.  The town’s entire law enforcement agency is, after all, a front for a sex slavery/pornography operation that, from the looks of things, is run about like what I imagine the typical Troma set is like:

About ten minutes from the end, the movie suddenly loses what little cohesion it has and the evil warden decides to kill Gillian because he finds out she’s a cop, despite the fact that they’ve had her badge and ID in their possession for the majority of the movie at this point.  Fortunately, after the fetishism gets another layer with a wrestling match that makes the Iron Sheik look like Tony Jaa, Gillian gets a knife from somewhere between scenes and after doing something with it (both of these being information Troma didn’t think the viewers would want), she discovers the prison’s cache of hand grenades, gasoline and AK-47s, and the escape plan pretty much comes together from there.

It’s pretty rough stuff, but believe it or not, there are two good things about this movie.  First is the sheriff, who I’m pretty sure is meant to come off as conflicted about his role in this sordid business, but instead just seems really frustrated that his coworkers can’t get simple things like planting drugs in a foxy lady’s car right.  He is, in effect, the Jim Halpert of human trafficking.

The second is the soundtrack, which — no joke — is awesome.  It consists of one song, and while I thought at first that it was something by a W.A.S.P cover band, that’s not possible because I didn’t form Wyldchyld until 1997.  Instead, as my research discovered, the title song is performed by the band Grim Reaper from the album Rock You To Hell.

This song is played no less than six times throughout the movie, not including the closing credits.  Say what you want about Troma, but damn if they didn’t get their money’s worth when they threw some cash to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.

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Chris Sims is a freelance comedy writer from South Carolina. He briefly attended USC before he dropped out to spend more time with Grand Theft Auto, and his career subsequently took the path that you might expect from someone who makes that sort of decision. He blogs at http://www.the-isb.com and creates comics at http://www.actionagecomics.com.