And you'd be right. Black Mama, White Mama, also known as 'Women in Chains,' is exactly the kind of trashy and crappy b-movie that the premise suggests. Pam Grier has been thrown into a prison on a small island with a lot of other women, and this place seriously makes the summer camp where Martha Stewart is locked up right now look like a maximum-security prison. It's not five minutes into the movie that one of the hottie guards utters the line 'Strip 'em and get 'em wet,' and then we are introduced to a prison life that resembles some college freshman's fantasy of what the inside of a sorority house is like. 

The prisoners soap and rub and wrestle with each other in the shower like it's a Girls Gone Wild shoot, then they all hang out together in their dorm, openly smoking pot and discussing in a big group what would be the best ways to escape. I've never been to prison myself, but I have a feeling that escape plans are the kind of thing that you want as few people as possible to know about, prisoners or guards or otherwise. The biggest difference between this prison life and some fantasy sorority life is that the women in this movie all wear orange cardigans (and no pants. Go figure) that say PRISON on the back. Must be those generic prison outfits for prisons that can't afford pricey accessories like their prison name or prisoner numbers for their uniforms.

And as is to be expected, a prison that can't afford to put prisoner identification on the backs of the uniforms can obviously not expect to be able to find guards that are interested in guarding the prisoners as much as they are in having sex with the prisoners and each other.

The conflict of the movie's title refers to the fact that Lee Daniels (Pam Grier) spends much of the time handcuffed to a blonde prisoner named Karen as they are on the run from the cops after escaping from the prison. I won't go into details about how they escape except to say that you might have seen something like it in The Fugitive had they been unable to afford to stage a train wreck, and it leads into the muddled story of the conflicting interests also chasing these two women for different reasons. Karen and Lee both have their own gangs of people each hoping to rescue their respective escaped prisoner, and the cops are after both of them all the while.

(spoilers) So Karen is involved with a bunch of hippies that want to Revolutionize Life As They Know It. Meanwhile, Karen just wants to get off the island, something she's been trying to do for years, and isn't it just perfect that they each need to go to completely opposite sides of the island in order to fulfill their goals. So we get this odd couple pairing and, since they are an odd couple, it's not hard to predict that they will hate each other for the vast majority of the film but grow fond of each other by the end.

In a movie with so many conflicting interests, especially when those conflicting interests not only propel the two main characters in opposite directions as they pursue their goals, it is not unreasonable to expect that there will be a climactic moment involving the rival gangs at some point in the movie. Not about to leave anyone unsatisfied, they throw in a stupid gang standoff at the end of the movie, where everyone shoots machine guns at each other, killing each other en masse while the two women paddle safely and calmly across the river in a little boat. Nice. 

Even better, at the end of the movie, after a huge massacre in which lots of people get shot and spurt bright red paint all over the place, the Captain of the police looks over the masses of dead criminals covered in awful, awful special effects, and we learn that he will be a Major before dinner. Not a bad way to end the movie, the criminals all kill each other off and the cops get all the credit, but here is the last line in the film  'It's better to win, isn't it?' 

Is THAT why the Captain is going to get promoted to Major? Because he figured that out???

Sentiment: negative