SWEET SUGAR (1972)
Article 3930 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 5-8-2012
Posting Date: 5-18-2012
Directed by Michel Levesque
Featuring Phyllis Davis, Ella Edwards, Timothy Brown
Country: USA
What it is: Women in Prison movie

A prostitute is set up for drug possession, but agrees to work at a sugar cane farm instead. But the work farm is brutally run, and the doctor there is an insane maniac who likes to experiment on the workers…

Okay, it’s not strictly a “women in prison” movie, but it’s pretty much working along the same lines and is meant to appeal to the same crowd. In short, this is heavy on the exploitation elements. These movies usually don’t have any fantastic content to them, but this one has a couple of elements. Some of the doctor’s “experiments” may put it into the realm of science fiction, and the appearance of a voodoo priest whose magic does seem to work (he locates the corpses of some of the doctor’s subjects by using his powers) adds a bit of fantasy/horror. I found the whole thing to be pretty silly, but then, I’ve never been a big fan of this particular genre, so I don’t have a whole lot of examples to which I can compare it. Still, I think it’s particularly stupid for the management of the farm to allow the captive women to all have their own machetes handy.