User Reviews

Makin' It (1980) Three female prisoners are paroled and collectively decide to form a soft rock band. Only catch is, the conditions of their parole state they are not to enter any venue that sells alcohol, nor to have contact with fellow parolees. This spawns an hour and a half of parole officers and state troopers trying to track them down, interspersed with horrible songs the girls perform in various roadhouse country bars. This movie isn't even worth watching for camp value. No one of note acts in it, other than Rory Calhoun who starred in Motel Hell the same year.The music is of a new wave meets disco kind of nature, so maybe if you like that kind of stuff then ... no, nevermind, you still won't like this piece of junk.

This enjoyably slight'n'silly piece of nothing fluff hardly manages to muster up much of a plot, but still succeeds in lazily rambling all over the place in an engagingly laid-back manner. The basic plot centers on a sultry and soulful racially mixed R&B distaff trio aptly named Hot. Headstrong black Margo (spunky Gwen Owens), sassy blonde Carol (lusciously tall and leggy eyeful Cathy Carson) and foxy Hispanic Maria (tasty cutie Juanita Curiel) make up the group, a saucy threesome fresh out of jail who are eager to make it in the music business. Our tart, mischievous and highly attractive trio wind up working at a sleazy roadside dive in the remote, crooked armpit desert burg of Pitts. They run afoul of the lecherous local yokel sheriff (goofy Gene Price), an equally libidinous corpulent judge (blubbery Joe Marmo), and their especially stern, repressed, but -- you guessed it! -- hot-to-trot lady parole officer (busty middle-aged dish A'leisha Brevard), all of whom jeopardize Hot's chances at going straight and staying out of trouble.

Director Dan Seeger has a tremendously difficult time at first finding and sustaining a solid, consistent groove -- the initial ten minutes are gruelingly slow and meandering -- but the admittedly flimsy story does eventually settle into a pleasantly frolicsome series of loosely strung together wacky comic minor incidents. Hot's scorchingly right-on song and dance numbers seriously smoke (the group in real life had a few R&B hits in the late 70's). A couple of amusingly dippy slapstick car chases and the inevitable rough'n'rowdy redneck bar fight considerably jazz things up as well. Rory Calhoun (Famer Vincent in "Motel Hell") has a nice bit as a hotshot TV and record producer. Better still, unsung hambone character actor Hy Pyke (the unforgettably creepy bus driver in "Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural") ravenously sinks his teeth into two juicy parts, portraying both an irascible bartender and an insufferably smarmy used car salesman with his usual delightfully frantic eye-rolling gusto. And, like a lot of drive-in potboilers, this honey offers a diverse multi-genre combo, mixing women-in-prison antics, rocksploitation "reach for the stars and hang tough for that Big Break" clichés, and down-home hillbilly tomfoolery into a likably dopey and lightweight cinematic time-killer.