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It can be argued that the golden age of sleaze ended with the dawn of cable television and the video age which followed. REAL sleaze--the Ilsa movies, Trap Them and Kill Them, Cannibal Ferrox--peters out around 1982 or so as the markets for it dried up. Video killed the drive-in and with it, the drive-in style exploiter (lest some astute reader carp at this assertion, I would point out that direct to video sleaze and made for cable sleaze are categorically NOT the same species of film as drive-in movie sleaze).

And yet, considerably after the fact, comes this exploitation magnum opus. Hellhole would have been right at home in a Texas drive-in. Hellhole is not a women-in-prison movie--oh, no--but a by god women-in-an-insane-asylum movie.

Judy Landers is our nominal heroine--bland as she is--and she doesn't emote or take her clothes off or anything else to command the viewer's interest, but she has less screen time than you would expect from a top-billed actress. Ms. Landers aside, Hellhole features a late performance from exploitation grande diva Mary Woronov as the head of the asylum. She doesn't take her clothes off, either, but who cares--she's Mary Woronov, fer chrissake!! As the head of the asylum!! Conducting illicit experiments with chemical lobotomy!!! ...Ahem. Not only that, but Ray Sharkey is completely unhinged as the bad guy masquerading as an orderly, as is Marjoe Gortner as Mary's reluctant assistant. And as far as sleaze content goes: we get no fewer than two nude catfights, and no fewer than four lesbian scenes (one with glue-sniffing and one of them in a mudbath). It may not measure down to the depths of depravity on display during the heyday of sleaze, but darned if it doesn't try.