NIGHTMARE IN BADHAM COUNTY & A BRIEF HISTORY OF SMALL SCREEN EXPLOITATION: GOING DOWN SOUTH & BEHIND BARS
BY AMANDA REYES

Television films of the seventies and eighties often recalled their theatrical B film counterparts, relying on salacious titles and taglines to lure viewers into their clutches (the full page 1974 TV Guide ad for the premiere of the Andy Griffin potboiler Savages screamed, “He’s found the perfect prey… A young, defenseless human”). However, because the FCC monitors television content, the small screen versions often fell back on the more classical elements of genre storytelling. Overt violence, foul language and nudity were a strict no-no for networks and the made for TV movie is frequently viewed as less sophisticated, hamfisted and sadly, disappointing. While television’s “adult-content” might not implement the same poetic license devices, many TV genre films did their best to mirror those 42^nd Street gems, and for kids like me—who couldn’t even get into an R rated film if we wanted to—the small screen offerings were the next best thing. And, while it would seem unlikely that the notorious Women in Prison (WiP) or hixploitation genres could find a home for themselves on television, the networks found different ways to inject common exploitation traits into their restrained offerings.

The WiP subgenre got its start in the 1930s with films like Ladies of the Big House (1931), and Ladies They Talk About (1933), but gained more traction in the fifties and sixties. While those entries could be rather sleazy, if reserved, it wasn’t until the seventies that WiP films entered more notorious territory, with titles such as The Big Doll House (1971), and Caged Heat (1974). Inevitably, early telefilms leaned toward the softer, earlier WiP films but peppered in a bit of the rougher modern fare, and the results were often mixed.

VHS artwork vamps up an already gritty Nightmare in Badham County, starring Lynne Moody and Deborah Raffin, seen here in a promotional still.

Following the subgenre rather faithfully, one of the grittiest telefilms is Nightmare in Badham County (ABC, 11/5/1976). In this tale, Cathy (Deborah Raffin) and Diane (Lynne Moody) are two pretty college girls driving across America during their summer break. Unfortunately, they enter Badham County, which is run by the ruthless Sheriff Danen (a menacing Chuck Connors), and he don’t cotton to their liberated ways. He arrests them on trumped up charges, and proceeds to rape Diane in her jail cell. After a shady court hearing, the girls are sent to a work farm run by Superintendent Dancer (Robert Reed!), but while Dancer might be the head honcho, he prefers to let the more sadistic prisoners run the show (such as Greer, played by Tina Louise). The farm is racially segregated, and Cathy and Diane are instantly separated. They are desperate to get help, and intend to contact a family member any way possible, but the people who run the farm are hip to just about every trick Cathy and Diane pull.

Watching the injustices occurring in Nightmare is a frustrating experience. The bad guys are always one step ahead of the protagonists and our girls never find an easy out. The leads are tremendously sympathetic and their ordeal is suspenseful, and ultimately, heartbreaking. This is a pull-no-punches kind of flick, encased in heavy dirt and grit. Lacking any glamorization, everyone is a sweaty mess—even Tina Louise, and her fab cheekbones, looks downright grungy. The only semi-likeable baddie is Dulcie (Fionnuala Flannigan) who is another trustee with a soft spot for Cathy. But, even she hardly bends, making it feel like the whole world (or at least Badham County) is against our girls.

Ironically, when Nightmare was released theatrically overseas there was some fairly gratuitous nudity included. This format led some audiences to believe it was a true grindhouse effort, and Nightmare has certainly transcended its more modest small screen beginnings to become known as a fairly notorious B grade sleazefest.

Ida Lupino, Belinda Montgomery, Jessica Walter and Lois Nettleton learn about lockup in the campy Women in Chains.

Arlene Farber and John Savage go backwoods in All the Kind Strangers.

But Nightmare wasn’t the first telefilm that tried to cash in on the WiP genre. Susan Dey took a similar misguided journey when her character heads across California in Cage Without a Key (CBS, 3/14/1975). Her car also breaks down and she becomes an unsuspecting accomplice in a robbery that leads to murder, landing her in a girl’s reformatory. And while not as politically motivated, this prison is also segregated, this time by the “good” clique and the “bad” girls, whom Dey inevitably runs afoul of. Using actual detention inmates as extras, Cage was presumably conceived as a teen-dramabordering-on-propaganda telefilm. Yet, it foreshadows the upcoming Nightmare through the nuanced lesbian subtext that would become far more overt in Nightmare’s flagrantly added footage.

Nightmare’s nihilistic tone also brings to mind the 1974 juvie jail shocker Born Innocent (NBC, 9/10/1974), where Linda Blair faces an uphill battle against the physical and mental atrocities of a screwed up system. Innocent pulls no punches in its grim presentation of teenage reformatories. Blair’s character, a runaway who is thrown into a detention center to teach her a lesson, gets lost in the system, and quite literally loses her innocence when she is infamously assaulted with a broom handle, leading her to become just as embittered as her cynical and hardened contemporaries. And while the film does serve to present a more accurate, and pessimistic, view of life as a ward of the state, the notorious rape scene—presented without warning—was met with outrage. The scandal resulted in a congressional hearing, which led to the implementation of the “Family Viewing Hour,” as well as a strong suggestion that networks present a parental advisory at the beginning of any television production featuring objectionable content.¹

Susan Dey and Sam Bottoms live life in a Cage Without a Key.

Jaclyn Smith tries to Escape from Bogen County.

On the other side of the misanthropic prison bars, Women in Chains (ABC, 1/25/1972) is an unintentional parody of the genre (and I adore it). The casting of Ida Lupino as a nasty prison warden is a nod to the actress’ appearance in Women’s Prison (1955), where she played a similar character. In Chains, parole officer Sandra Parker (Lois Nettleton) goes undercover in a female correctional facility to expose Lupino, who may be behind the death of one of Parker’s charges. Admittedly, Chains lacks a lot of grit that these types of films are famous for, but ups its camp factor with silly scenarios: one of the biggest acts of inmate rebellion is putting powder footprints on the cell walls (gee, that will never come off!), as well as including a “solitary” confinement chamber that houses two prisoners at a time, which probably defeats its purpose. And, even in its toned down, straight-faced presentation, it manages to be a rather amiable entry into the notorious genre.

Several other films have been produced through the years, including Inmates: A Love Story (ABC, 2/13/1981), which looks at what life might be like in a co-ed prison system (answer: it’s apparently romantic). In 1994, a female writing and directing team took on corruption behind the walls of a women’s prison in the ABC movie Against Their Will: Women in Prison (10/20/1994). However, with a few exceptions in the realm of made for cable telefilms, the WiP subgenre lost its edge of exploitation, and faded quietly into the small screen sunset.

While Nightmare in Badham County stands as one of the most memorable of these small screen WiP entries, it also falls into another popular seventies exploitation subgenre, Hillbilly Horror, also known as hixploitation. Conjuring up many diverse images, from sultry weather and gothic plantations to barefoot children living in lean-to housing, the South, as sometimes depicted in the telefilm, is regarded as a place of conservative domination, where traditional ethics overshadow all other beliefs and values. Although sitcoms of the sixties often presented the South as a place of goofy and simple people (see The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and Petticoat Junction for examples), the telefilms of the seventies embraced the darker stereotypes, for better or worse, and the product was uniformly interesting.

In Nightmare the hillbilly is expressed through its corrupt and racist southern “work farm” system that seeks to oppress, and/or destroy the ethos of strong young liberated women. Strangely, although the men take more of a backseat, they are the dominant force behind the protagonists’ torture, and, for one, ultimate demise.

Like the WiP film, hixploitation flicks could be found early in cinema history with titles like King of the Pack (1926), and Mountain Justice (1930). They remain early markers of poverty stricken white rural Americana that would develop into the debased inbred, and sexually dysfunctional rednecks that filled up drive-ins throughout the seventies. And, again like the WiP on television, the hick mold was toned down, although many nasty undertones come across clearly, especially that of the backward, violent hillbilly man.

All the Kind Strangers (ABC, 11/12/1974) explores these hixploitation conventions with a group of seven clodhopping kids so eager for a whooping, they kidnap unwitting strangers and force them into the role of disciplinary parents. Stacy Keach is the sophisticated Northerner who picks up a precocious child walking down a long stretch of nothing highway. Once at the house, Keach is introduced to his siblings—ranging in age from five to eighteen, and, strangely enough, their British “Ma,” even though it has been established that Ma (and Pa) died sometime back. These kids are desperate for a strong authority figure, and pick up random strangers whenever they present themselves. Unfortunately, if the newly and forcibly adopted parental units don’t express love with vicious castigation, they are killed off.

Strangers presents Keach as materialistic but enlightened, and the bevvy of uneducated rugrats speak with hillbilly overtones and look like they could use a new pair of shoes. The mute sister (Arlene Farber) defines a backward backwoods sexuality, even going as far as putting a snake in her nuMa’s bed in an effort to win Keach’s hand. As the eldest sibling, John Savage is pure menace, but, although he’s old enough, and stern enough to take over the empty patriarchal spot at the table, he clings to a lower hierarchal space in lieu of recreating the idealized family unit, emphasizing the stereotyped conservative South’s desire to maintain an unwavering version of family.

Enforcing conventional family ideals through violent means was also the theme of Escape from Bogen County (CBS, 11/7/1977), which features a young Jaclyn Smith (working through her first Charlie’s Angels hiatus) as a woman who is only seen as property. Her husband is a rough and powerful abuser, who treats his wife like a terrified possession. And, much like Connors in Nightmare, he also runs his town on the same fear factor, backed by a stupid and corrupt police force. Michael Parks is the new cop on the block and he’d rather be a country singer than an officer of the law. He is, as you might have guessed, assigned as Smith’s love interest. Embodying the perfect Southern Gentlemen, he even serenades Smith as she rots in a holding cell. The film, meant to carry over mainstream feminist underpinnings, loses its message in its hixploitation haze, but the music is nice.

Whereas Nightmare was released as a telefilm, and then found itself as a notorious exploitation theatrical release, in a serendipitous move, on December 2, 1978, CBS premiered Outside Chance, which sort of follows the same blueprint in reverse. This half remake/half reimagining of Jackson County Jail, which had been released the previous year, features Yvette Mimieux reprising her role in the somewhat notorious hixploitation/WiP mashup. Yvette is Dinah Hunter, an advertising executive who runs afoul of a corrupt small town when her car is stolen on a road trip. In Jackson, Mimieux kills the guard who rapes her in her holding cell and then flees with a young Tommy Lee Jones. In the “remake,” she stands trial for the murder of the officer and is sent to the pokey, where she escapes with the girlfriend of the man who stole her car! Definitely not as gritty as the original, the director of both films injects approximately thirty minutes of footage from Jackson into Chance, and also has the good sense to cast Betty Thomas as a callous fur poacher, which makes it worth a view just for that!

And again, much like the WiP telefilms, hixploitation never truly took off as a much sought after TVM subgenre, but did enjoy a few more interesting releases. Wes Craven’s Stranger in Our House (aka Summer of Fear, NBC, 10/31/1978) places the hillbilly as an interloper into the more “sophisticated” suburban community, forcing her to resort to black magic and mayhem to fit in. The generally well-received ABC Movie of the Week, Moon of the Wolf (9/27/1972) uses the Louisiana Bayou as the setting for a werewolf horror picture, while also exposing the underbelly of the rich South. Even Roger Corman got into the mix in the 1980 pilot movie The Georgia Peaches (CBS), which is a good ol’ boy comedy attempting to latch onto the success of The Dukes of Hazzard.

Nightmare in Badham County’s mixture of the two subgenres helps the telefilm stand out in a way very few other TVMs have, making it a fascinating curio that indicates ABC’s awareness of then-popular B-movie fare. Despite its flaws and the unnecessary addition of nudity, Nightmare aptly, even if somewhat softly, reflects the drive-in culture of the era, bringing some of its more lovably outrageous features directly into our living rooms.

 

1The Family Viewing Hour was a policy established in 1975 by the Federal Communications Commission, which declared the primetime hours of 8–9 P.M. as family friendly, meaning networks should be even more wary of violent or sexual content. Although this code was overturned in 1977 the general concept remained and became a staple of primetime television programming.