Sweet Sugar

“Her machete isn’t her only weapon!” Movies about sexy women in jungle prisons were big biz in 1972, and Dimension Pictures’ first reaction to New World’s THE BIG DOLL HOUSE and THE BIG BIRD CAGE was SWEET SUGAR. Filmed in Costa Rica by director Michel Levesque (WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS) from a script by THE BIG DOLL HOUSE’s Don Spencer, SWEET SUGAR has a real ace in the hole in the shapely form of star Phyllis Davis, who later became well known for her three seasons backing up private eye Robert Urich on ABC’s VEGA$.

A brassy mixture of intelligence, confidence, and rarely equalled sex appeal, Davis was the Mae West of 1970s exploitation. She played plenty of bit parts in television series like ADAM-12 and THE WILD WILD WEST and movies like THE BIG BOUNCE and Russ Meyer’s BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (testing the sexploitation waters?), but her best roles by far were in SWEET SUGAR and another Dimension WIP (women-in-prison movie), TERMINAL ISLAND. The gloriously perverse SWEET SUGAR gives her the title role: Sugar Bowman, a stacked smartass hooker busted on a trumped-up pot charge who forgoes prison for a two-year stint cutting sugar cane on a Central American plantation.

Sugar not only runs afoul of rival inmate Simone (DETROIT 9000’s Ella Edwards) and brutal guard Burgos (pockmarked Cliff Osmond, memorable in THE FORTUNE COOKIE), but especially the psychotic warden, Doctor John (Angus Duncan), a perverted ascot-wearing physician who performs medical experiments on the prisoners. Of course, Sugar eventually leads a climactic revolt against authorities in a blizzard of bullets and explosions — these pictures generally stuck to a formula — but not before the requisite torture scenes, catfighting scenes, rape scenes, lesbian love scenes (scored with ‘60s lounge music), voodoo scenes (!) and, of course, shower scenes.

Though Spencer’s plot is standard as these things go, its dialogue (“I hope somebody hacks off your hambone!”) and tone are decidedly weird, which works to the film’s benefit. For instance, Doctor John sits on a throne sipping brandy while a woman dangles before him in a bamboo cage over a roaring fire. He hooks up female inmates to a cheap-looking machine (like a car battery charger) that measures their sex drive, and he punishes misbehavers with an army of horny pussycats! With the drive-in market glutted with WIPs, making SWEET SUGAR a bit goofy also makes it one of the genre’s most memorable vehicles. SWEET SUGAR was produced by Dimension’s husband-and-wife team of Charles S. Swartz and Stephanie Rothman, who directed Davis (and Tom Selleck) in TERMINAL ISLAND a year later.