This made-for-TV movie from NBC starred Linda Blair as Chris Parker, a serial runaway 14-year-old with a dysfunctional home life and an uncaring family who is given over to the care of the state and finds herself in a juvenile detention centre for girls.
There she’s soon at the mercy of both staff and inmates on a daily (and nightly) basis, climaxing in a frightening and graphic shower-room rape scene involving a broom handle.
The time has come for her to fight back, at anybody, anyway she can.
In what is without a doubt a devastating indictment of juvenile detention institutions, Linda Blair (star of The Exorcist) gave an almost faultless and massively chilling performance, fighting and spitting her way through a movie that surpasses the inhumanity of Chained Heat (1983).
The shock of viewers and some Congressman over the explicit scenes of a 14-year-old girl’s rape contributed to the introduction of the ‘Family Viewing Rule’ by the US television industry in 1975, sanitising the 7.00 pm to 9.00 pm time period.
Christine Parker
Linda Blair
Counsellor Barbara Clark
Joanna Miles
Mrs Parker
Kim Hunter
Mr Parker
Richard Jaeckel
Emma Lasko
Allyn Ann McLerie
Miss Murphy
Mary Murphy
Director
Donald Wrye