Sometimes the line between satirizing something and just being that something is hard to define. Sure, Scream makes fun of cheesy horror flicks, but it also is a cheesy horror flick. And while Reform School Girls does tweak the conventions of the women-in-prison genre, it also leans heavily on them -- lots of gang showering, catfights, and hose-downs.

When is a nude shower scene a satire of nude shower scenes, and when is it just a nude shower scene? When is a spoof of bad acting just bad acting? Regardless, Reform School Girls is firmly in the cult canon, thanks to Wendy O. Williams's over-the-top performance and so-bad-it's-funny dialogue.

Writer/director Tom DeSimone started directing porn movies in the seventies, then moved on to exploitation flicks like the women-in-prison features Prison Girls and The Concrete Jungle. (Those ones weren't parodies. They were serious.) And to hear him talk about it, DeSimone certainly thinks that he was making a satire. I'm just not sure that he's right.

Sybil Danning (a women-in-prison alum from Chained Heat) steps into the jackboots of Warden Sutter, dictator of Pridemore Juvenile Facility. Head Matron Edna (Pat Ast, mugging her way through a part Divine must have turned down) keeps the girls in line with threats, violence, and the muscle of her gal toy Charlie, the Queen Bee of Dorm 14 (Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics, a hard-living 36-year-old playing a teenager; she was only two years younger than Danning).

When Jenny Williams (Linda Carol) gets mixed up in a robbery, she's sentenced to three years at Pridemore, where she immediately gets herself into trouble with Charlie for protecting Lisa (Sherri Stoner), a fragile runaway. (Not without first taking a shower, of course; seriously, they're naked before the credits end.) The new girls soon find out that Pridemore is being run as a labor camp, and not even Dr. Norton (Charlotte McGinnis), the Debra Winger-alike psychologist, can help break Sutter and Edna's reign.

Dorm 14 is like a Motley Crue video of a women's prison, lots of Aqua-Net and ripped fishnets. Charlie is actually pretty frightening, with her hatchet face and chainsaw voice, all scrawny tanning bed tan and big blonde hair, like Iggy Pop with an $1800 boob job.

Jenny tries to sneak out by seducing the truck driver who carts them to the fields. He sleeps with her, but still turns her in. His great seduction line? "Let’s play carnival." Then Edna finds the kitten that Lisa's been hiding and stomps it dead, an homage to the 1950 women-in-prison classic Caged. When a distraught Lisa falls to her death from a water tower, the girls riot, tearing apart the dorm and, you know, pillow fighting. Sutter steps in to take control, and puts Jenny and Charlie both in solitary.

Dr. Norton finally brings her story to the Youth Authority Board, but they side with Sutter, so Jenny busts out of solitary and leads the girls in a revolt, kidnapping guards and wrecking the place. Edna faces them down with a shotgun, and opens fire on the crowd. The final fight, with Charlie in a leather bikini, standing on top of a bus bearing down on Edna up the water tower, is pretty funny. You don't hear "Burn you bitch, burn!" and "I'll see you in hell, Edna!" every day. Charlie and Edna both die (natch), and Jenny goes free (also natch).

Soon after, Tom DeSimone moved on to television, and Wendy O. Williams went back to music. (She committed suicide in 1998.) Sybil Danning's status as an icon was recognized in Grindhouse, where she appeared in the Rob Zombie-directed fake trailer for Werewolf Women of the SS.

So is Reform School Girls a parody of women-in-prison movies, or just another women-in-prison movie? Either way, it's worth watching as a reminder that people used to make movies like this, the last gasp of a storied species of exploitation flicks. We may never see a film like this again. But we'll always have Edna.

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