-Grindhouse Fest is the special section in Celluloid Dimension where you can discover all the goodies…and baddies from the golden age of exploitation cinema. Have fun!
Directed by Don Jones
Written by Don Jones
Starring:
- Gary Kent as Frank Barrows
- John Parker as John Barrows (credited as John Stoglin)
- Stafford Morgan as Robert Matthews (credited as Robert Mathews)
- Suzanne Lund as Ginger
- Cheryl Waters as Bonnie (credited as Leah Tate)
Rating: 
Few films wallow in 1970s exploitation quite like Don Jones’ sleazoid anti-classic. It’s a fever-drenched scuzz of low-rent depravity, where two deranged brothers play their mother’s wicked little game. John (John Parker), a dull-witted servant to his own twisted urges, delights in “doctoring” his captive women. Frank (Gary Kent), consumed by cruelty, turns their imprisonment into a brutal rapey spectacle—pain is his medium, violence his art. Jones directs with an unsettling chill, refusing to dress his horrors in anything resembling style. His film, stripped of flourish, falls into a strange abyss, where madness and mediocrity blend into something disturbingly effective. The clashing sound design and erratic pacing don’t seem like intentional choices, yet their jarring presence only amplifies the film’s schizoid atmosphere, mirroring the fractured psyches of its characters. Beneath all the sleaze, Schoolgirls in Chains makes no effort to hide its Psycho influences—it practically parades them. The controlling matriarch, the warped psychology, the looming shadow of sexual perversion—Jones doesn’t just borrow from Hitchcock’s masterpiece; he drags its themes through the muck of exploitation. And unlike Psycho, where incest remains an implied horror, Schoolgirls in Chains turns suggestion into explicit narrative, twisting familial dysfunction into something even darker. It’s trash, sure, but not without accidental foresight. Beneath its sleazy foundation lurk the future shadows of Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Troma’s Mother’s Day, echoes of its dysfunctional horrors rippling through exploitation cinema like a perverse prophecy. The film falters, often frustratingly, but when its outrageous “good ol’ mama’s boy nastiness” is at full force, it earns its place as a schlock-laden shocker.
