Monday, November 11, 2024

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: THE HOT BOX (1972) ** ½

FORMAT:  DVD

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on June 19th, 2012)

Before taking the directorial reigns for the first time with Caged Heat, Jonathan Demme co-wrote and produced this somewhere-a-bit-up-the-road-from-middle-of-the-road exploitation picture for Roger Corman. It sorta plays like an amalgamation of a Corman Nurse movie and a Cirio H. Santiago Jungle Action flick. The results are admittedly mixed, yet mostly entertaining.

A bunch of nurses go deep into the jungle to do some relief work in a third world nation. They get kidnapped by some revolutionaries who force them to teach the guerillas first aid. (Yes, there is a mouth to mouth scene.) Whenever the girls get out of line they’re sent to the titular box where they’re locked in a cage and scalded with steam. Despite that, the girls still manage to sympathize with their captors and even wind up fighting for the cause!

The Hot Box is not a good movie really, but it has all the elements you’d want from a good movie. That is to say there’s lots of action and lots of T &A and… well… not much else. Because of that, I can give The Hot Box a more than passable recommendation.

BUT… everything else about the picture is lacking. The pacing is lethargic, and the flick feels a lot longer than it is due to the indifferent story structure. Plus, The Hot Box itself doesn’t even come into play until the movie’s about 2/3 of the way over! What’s up with that? And I would’ve liked a bit more nursing scenes at the start of the flick too before the action switched over to the jungle. That just might be a matter of preference though. Then again, what movie couldn’t benefit from a bunch of hot nurses getting in and out of uniform?

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