Wordiezett So much average

Lawbolisted Powerful

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

ActuallyGlimmer The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Michael_Elliott Jackson County Jail (1976)*** (out of 4) Dinah (Yvette Mimieux) gets into a fight with her boss and when she returns home she catches her husband cheating on her once again. She's finally had enough and takes a job in New York and decides to drive cross country but after picking up a pair of hitchhikers everything goes to Hell. She's robbed by the hitchhikers and this leads to a run of bad luck, which has her thrown in jail with bad boy Coley Blake (Tommy Lee Jones).JACKSON COUNTY JAIL walks a fine line between a serious drama and the type of exploitation flick that were very popular at the drive-in during this era. I must admit that I'm really shocked at how well-made the film was and at how little exploitation there actually is. I say that because Roger Corman was the producer and we know what type of movies he was pumping out during the 1970's. Fans of good dramas should enjoy this picture.The greatest thing for the film are certainly the two lead performers as both of them deliver excellent performances. You just can't help but feel bad for Mimieux and she perfectly captures this character, her heartache and eventually her willingness to fight to try and live. Jones is also excellent in this early performance as the tough guy who was "born dead." The two actors share some great chemistry and really make for an entertaining team. We even have Robert Carradine in a small supporting role.The film features a pretty non-graphic but disturbing rape sequence, which is extremely well directed by Michael Miller. The sequence is quite tense without crossing the lines of bad taste. The film runs a very quick 83-minutes and there's really not a slow spot anywhere to be found. JACKSON COUNTY JAIL has a big cult following and it's easy to see why.

dougdoepke Fast, tough, and unsentimental. Sure, a potboiler like this is not going to win any awards, but it's got more sheer pluck and energy than twenty A-productions of the time. Pity poor Dinah Hunter (Mimieux). One minute she's a bigshot ad executive in Hollywood; the next, she's ducking cop bullets somewhere in fly-over country. It's a yuppie nightmare all the way for poor Dinah, a steady downhill once she tries a cross-country car ride. On the way she meets homicidal kids, a chiseling waitress, a righteous cop, and a prison guard from heck. No wonder she's on the run with cool dude Coley (Jones). How else can you deal with a cross section of Roger Corman's rural America. Next time she better take the plane like other bi-coastal types.Corman really hit pay dirt with hillbilly epics like Boxcar Bertha (1972), Big Bad Mama (1974), Crazy Mama (1975), and this one. One look at these and you'd think rural America is just as bloody and hormonally driven as big city America. But these epics are also in the great tradition of the American B-movie, those cheap productions that show guts, energy, and style. Sure, a flick like JCJ is also what some might call vulgar and exploitative, which it is. Still, there can be a lot of truth even in exaggerated crowd pleasers. Besides, these drive-in specials are generally entertaining as heck, just like this one.

Woodyanders Eternally entrancing firebrand actress Yvette Mimieux scores her best, strongest, most commanding and effective role to date as a smart, classy, fiercely self-sufficient no bulls**t Los Angeles businesswoman who runs afoul of psycho hicks and rapist redneck cops when she goes down South during her cross country trek from California to New York. Poor Yvette has one of those days which justifies the age-old cliché "sometimes it's better to stay home in bed": her car is stolen by a creepy backwoods hick nutjob (an intense, jittery Robert Carradine, who's genuinely frightening in a rare full-blooded sicko fruitcake part), she's wrongly put in the hoosegow by the local yokel cops after loutish bartender Britt Leach tries to sexually assault her, kills one particularly unpleasant hillbilly fuzzball after he brutally rapes her (the rape scene itself is quite graphic and upsetting), breaks out of jail and subsequently goes on the lam with tough, but tender-hearted career criminal Tommy Lee Jones."Jackson County Jail" qualifies as one of those great legendary rarities: it's a 70's redneck drive-in exploitation movie that not only delivers the goods and then some, but also the kind of gritty, top-notch, fairly plausible flick that both wholly earns and completely lives up to its killer cult status. Mark Miller's remarkably artful and assured direction plays a key role in making the film the grind-house classic that it is: the quick, unrelenting pace never let's up for a minute, the action scenes are rousing and marvelously choreographed, and the solid, pretty complicated and arresting narrative hooks the viewer from the get-go. Moreover, the film's astute depiction of the relative differences and similarities between cops and criminals is wickedly subversive: The crooks for the most part are loyal, honorable and compassionate folks while a majority of the police are total a**holes. This deliciously amoral masterstroke, a typically twisted piece of 70's B-movie nihilism which boldly bucks convention, lifts "Jackson County Jail" well above the rut of your standard-issue by-the-numbers formula drive-in fare.However, that's not to say that "Jackson County Jail" fails to hit the bull's eye in other departments; it's an across-the-board winner in every conceivable way. The uniformly excellent cast alone testifies to this: Severn Darden as a prissy, kindly, quirky sheriff, Howard Hesseman as Yvette's faithless smarmy husband, Mary Woronov as a butch lesbian outlaw gal, "Revenge of the Cheerleaders" 's adorable lead bimbo Patrice Rohmer as Jones' jealous ex-girlfriend, Cliff Emmich as a loathsome male chauvinist CEO Yvette tells off at the start of the movie, and future "Hill Street Blues" TV series regular Betty Thomas as a saucy, outspoken greasy spoon waitress who tries to fleece Yvette out of ten bucks. Loren Newkirk's melancholy, harmonica-heavy, nicely down-home country score, the often razor-sharp dialogue (when Yvette tells Jones to be careful when he faces off with the pigs at the film's thrilling conclusion, Jones responds with this choice fatalistic retort: "I was born dead anyway"), the unsparingly bleak and harsh downbeat nightmarish tone, and especially Bruce Logan's agile, polished cinematography (the use of hand-held camera for Jones' climactic face-off with the law really does the stirring trick) are all also highly impressive. Gripping, suspenseful and exciting in comparable measure, "Jackson County Jail" stands tall as a sterling example of 70's hayseed exploitation cinema at its tense, tantalizing zenith.

S.F.1014 This movie is about a woman getting into trouble - nothing more and nothing less. she gets robbed by two hitch-hikers, she's put into prison because she ain't got a passport anymore, a policeman rapes her and she kills him after that and escapes with a prisoner...The movie continues this way, event-event-event... Director Michael Miller is so concerned about being boring, he leaves feelings and emotion.Jones and Mimieux do their parts well, especially Mimieux. Too, I miss at least a few experiments with camera and music, but if you don't want to think about a movie this might be right for you.