Penitentiary III

A naive young girl from the South moves in with her relatives in a Los Angeles ghetto. At first she is made fun of, but eventually she is accepted and plots to rob a bank to raise bail money for her new boyfriend, who is a jailed drug dealer.

A young man takes over as the head of a crack dealing outfit after his brother, the gang's leader, is murdered.

An ex-con, on parole and trying to straighten his life out, decides to resume his boxing career when one of his prison enemies escapes and kills his girlfriend.

After wrongly doing time in prison for murder, a man seeks revenge on a racist law enforcement system and the detective who framed him.

A hitchhiker named Martel Gordone gets in a fight with two bikers over a prostitute, and one of the bikers is killed. Gordone is arrested and sent to prison, where he joins the prison's boxing team in an effort to secure an early parole and to establish his dominance over the prison's toughest gang.

Jamaa Fanaka’s first project plays off the Blaxploitation’s genre conventions, an adaption of Goethe’s “Faust” presented with a non-synchronous soundtrack and superimposed over a remake of Super Fly (1972). Often out of focus with an overactive camera, the film immediately exudes nervous energy, but unlike Priest’s elegant cocaine consumption in Super Fly, Willie’s arm gushes blood as he injects heroin. A morality tale in two reels. —Jan-Christopher Horak