There are two movies named Red Heat. One has Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Belushi in it. The other has Sylvia Kristel abusing Linda Blair. If you can guess which one ended up on our website, thank you for being a reader.

Linda plays Christine Carlson, an American college student who travels to West Germany to visit her fiance Mike. She wants to get married, he wants to re-enlist in the army. She gets upset and walks away one night, but this is Germany in the 1980’s. Things don’t work out the way she hopes — at all.

By this point in Linda Blair’s career, I look at her like a pro wrestler going from territory to territory as a top babyface working the best heels in the world. She’s already had an epic battle with Sybil Danning in Chained Heat. Now, it’s time for her to face off with Emmanuelle and Lady Chatterley herself, Sylvia Kristel. I wonder if she and Linda discussed their shared history of being in the Airport films, with Blair being in Airport 1975 and Sylvia appearing in the scummiest of those films, The Concorde … Airport ’79.

After being upset by her boyfriend going back into the military. Christine takes a late night walk where she gets kidnapped and jailed by the East German Stasi, charged with spying and thrown into prison.

Sofia (Kristel) is the top bad girl there and takes pride in her non-stop abuse of the others. She annihilates Christine at every turn before finally, our heroine can take no more, beating her in a brawl.

Meanwhile, Mike spends the movie convincing the army and West Germans to help him free his fiance. She gets out at the end, escaping a prison where nearly every woman has a facial tattoo, but you get the idea that she’s not the same as she was when she went in.

Director Robert Collector would later make the first adaption of George R.R. Martin’s Nightflyers. Here, he’s made a lurid potboiler that hits all the beats of the WIP genre while taking it much further inside the Iron Curtain. And hey — dig that amazing Tangerine Dream score, which seems like it was destined for a much higher class film!