Des diamants pour l'enfer

Shirley (Lina Romay) ends up in a maximum security prison after shooting her boyfriend dead. Said boyfriend happened to have been a murdering thief who had just stolen millions of dollars worth of diamonds.

Shirley is soon located by a man who is very interested in recovering the stolen diamonds. He watches through binoculars as the story in the prison unfolds. He eventually visits Shirley, but who cares about him anyway?

Inside, the warden of the unusually posh penitentiary wears a black turtleneck, looking like a sort of beatnik Tom Savini. He's a standard pervert out to "help" the female inmates as often as he possibly can.

This is a Jess Franco film, so these inmates are all impossibly beautiful, and constantly seeking out reasons to shed their burdensome clothes. Not that there's all that much clothing to worry about, since the prison uniforms consist of long shirts, high heels, and no pants.

There is, of course, the obligatory torture to accentuate the rampant nudity. The merciless warden likes to watch the whippings like the heinous ghoul he is. He's downright giddy when Shirley is chained to the terrible "hot seat"!

There are also plenty of adult situations that give Franco ample opportunity to... zoom in.

Though dull and talky in spots, this movie still outshines Franco's 99 WOMEN, and the the "turning of the tables" finale isn't bad at all...

This film has been a special target of mine for some time; not because I particularly enjoy the women in prison genre; but simply because it was the only film on the DPP's Video Nasty shopping list that I hadn't seen. Anyway, the inclusion of this film on the Video Nasty list would seem to be another huge error from the DPP. The 'women in prison' genre has no shortage of vile, exploitative efforts; and many of those would deserve a place on the Video Nasty list. This one, however, is one of the least exploitative I've ever seen and yet it's the only women in prison film on there! Furthermore, the film actually has a plot! It focuses on a diamond robbery; followed by the murder of the man that did it by his girlfriend, who is then sent to a women's prison where she is subjected to some mild exploitation. There's some lesbian sex and stuff featured; but nothing really that 'bad'. The film does feel cheap and nasty in places; but the cinematography is decent and it feels like a professional production. It has to be said that the film is a little bit dull at times; but it doesn't overstay it's welcome at less than eighty minutes and just for the fact that it has some story, I'd rate this among the better films of the genre.

This video nastie was banned in Britain and never released.

No, it wasn't for Jesus Franco's propensity for plenty of full frontal nudity, including his own wife, Lina Romay. After all, they have made over 100 films together, and I am sure moviegoers know her as well as he does.

No, it was the application of the old "Tucker Telephone." I don't know if Franco got the idea from the Tucker prison farm in Arkansas, or from Generalissimo Franco, but the application of electrical wires to his wife's vagina and the electrical current was too much for the Brits.

Yes, there is a poorly done lesbian scene (only one), and the women in prison all slept naked, but that gets to be a bore after a while. Mostly people just smoked and talked. Pretty boring.

It's not at all surprising that, along with Lucio Fulci, Jess Franco has the honour of being the director with the most films on the official Video Nasty list: with virtually his entire filmography consisting of exploitative trash designed to either titillate or offend through explicit sex, torture and gore, his work was bound to be targeted during the Draconian days of Mary Whitehouse and James Ferman. What is surprising, though, is that given today's more relaxed attitude to sex and violence in film, Women Behind Bars still remains unavailable in the UK to this day.

Barring a couple of unconvincing scenes of torture (some laughable whipping and that old WIP classic, the electrodes on the genitalia), Women Behind Bars contains very little to get to get in lather about. It's chock full of full frontal female nudity of course (including Jess' trademark close-up crotch shots), and contains one lesbian tryst (between lovely Lina Romay and sexy blonde Martine Stedil), but with the director devoting more time and attention than usual to something vaguely resembling a plot, the general level of depravity is a few notches lower than your average Franco flick and nowhere near as shocking as one might expect given the film's notoriety.

This relative tameness, combined with Franco's usual lack of technical prowess (his direction and camera-work is wildly erratic; the action moves like an arthritic sloth on Xanax), atrocious dialogue and lousy acting, makes the film a real chore to get through. Maybe that's why it hasn't had a UK DVD release yet: nobody thinks it would be worth the effort.

Well, here we go again. This is another in Jess Franco's endless selection of exploitation movies. In this case Jess has turned his hand to the women in prison genre. It's certainly an area that is well suited to Mr Franco's sensibilities seeing as these are types of movies that demand sleaze by the bucket full. Women Behind Bars is no different seeing as it has loads of full frontal nudity and a couple of torture scenes. The story, such that it is begins when some diamonds are stolen from a Chinese junk. The only surviving thief is shot by his wife and she hides the jewels. She is then sent to a tough women's prison where abuse is the order of the day. Meanwhile, several characters try to free her so that she can reveal the location of the diamonds.

This production was another product of the infamous cheap-jack French exploitation film producers Eurociné. Its main claim to fame is easily its inclusion on the notorious Video Nasty list, which was a group of films released on home video that were regarded as obscene by the British establishment back in the early 80's. It seems pretty obvious that this one fell afoul of the censors on the basis of its two torture scenes. In them, one naked woman is viciously whipped and then another has electrodes attached to her vagina. That sort of stuff pretty much guaranteed Video Nasty status, irrespective of how unconvincing it was. Other than this there is a lesbian sex coupling and many shots where the camera zooms into female crotches. All of the depravity is overseen by a sleazy and sadistic warden who expects sexual favours from the inmates.

Franco muse Lina Romay stars in the lead role and she looks quite nice. But like any film from this director, acting performances are merely an after-thought. The film-making is very cheap and amateurish throughout. Like many Franco films it feels like it must have been shot in a couple of days. He adopts the approach of merely pointing the camera at the action and shooting (and then zooming in). The camera-work is shaky and there is little in the way of editing. But despite the Z-Grade nature of Women Behind Bars it was entertaining enough. The short running time was certainly a bonus admittedly. Franco's sledgehammer approach does have a grimy charm though and this one far from his worst.