| Femmes Fatales | Feb 6 2021 |
This tree right here? It's mine. This patch of land around the tree too. Actually this whole forest is pretty much mine.
You never know what wildlife you'll come across during a walk in the forest. If it happened to be U.S. actress Margaret Markov, well, she beats the hell out of a white-tailed deer or a black-rumped woodpecker or any other kind of fauna. Markov starred in the unforgettable prisonsploitation flick The Hot Box, the indelible blaxploitation flick Black Mama, White Mama, and the ineradicable swordsploitation flick The Arena. You won't get this photo out of your mind either. It appeared in the Belgian magazine Ciné-Revue in 1975.
| Vintage Pulp | Jun 23 2016 |
Machine gun Margaret strikes again.
In the tropical Republic of San Rosario four beautiful nurses—Margaret Markov, Rickey Richardson, Andrea Cagan, and Laurie Rose—are kidnapped and forced to teach the healing arts to a revolutionary army so it can bring medical care to villages it liberates. While one of the nurses begins to agree with the captors, the others just want to escape. But when they do, they are captured by an army leader and what they learn prompts them to escape back to the revolutionaries' jungle compound to warn them of an impending government attack.
Scripted by Jonathan Demme and produced in the sweaty Philippines by sexploitation specialists New World Pictures, The Hot Box features most of the elements you expect from jungle sleaze, with perhaps less skin than the standard. But there's plenty of leering, drooling, and general depravity, followed by punching, kicking, stabbing, and Margaret Markov going cyclical with a machine gun. By the way, we'd not note this ordinarily, but post-massacre we'll add that mowing down people with machine guns is fine for cinema, but all other applications are idiotic and tragic.
There's a debate online about whether this is a women-in-prison film. People often get obtuse online—of course it's a women-in-prison film. The nurses don't spend three reels inside a bamboo cage being hosed down with river water, but they are twice held against their will and escape both times. Textbook stuff. Do we recommend the film? Not quite. But Markov is always worth the time. Amongst a slate of atrocious performers, she can almost act. Almost. The Hot Box premiered in the U.S. today in 1972.
PhilippinesNew World PicturesThe Hot BoxAndrea CaganLaurie RoseRickey RichardsonMargaret MarkovJonathan Demmeposter artcinemasexploitationwomen in prisonmovie review
