Des diamants pour l'enfer

Woman behind bars, directed by Jess Franco(as Rick Deconnink)is basically an exploitation film set in a woman's prison. The film has several of Franco's trademarks such as lots of full frontal nudity and woman being tortured in a number of ways. One such torture scene involves the star Lina Romay, who in reality is the wife of Jess Franco, having live electrodes applied to her breasts and genitals.

Because of these torture scenes the film was placed on the DPP video nasty list. Eventually the film was removed from the list but the film has never been re-released.

In the film Romay murders her boyfriend to steal his hoard of diamonds, but she winds up in prison in the hands of a sadistic warden and his guards The film would appeal to fans of Franco's directing style and also fans of exploitation films especially the woman in prison sub genre.

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.

Women Behind Bars (1975)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Jess Franco women in prison flick, which deals more with a robbery than the actual prison. A woman (Lina Romay) gets six years in prison after killing her jewel thief boyfriend. Once behind bars she has all sorts of wicked people trying to get her to tell where the boyfriend hid the diamonds before she shot him. This is a somewhat interesting film since Franco decided to concentrate more on the jewels rather than the behind the bars stuff. There's still some dirty moments including tons of nudity, a lesbian scene and a couple torture sequences but this is still fairly clear for a Franco WIP film. Romay has never been accused of being a good actress but she fits her role fine here and she's certainly cute so watching her naked isn't a problem. Franco himself plays a gangster in the film, which is a role he did quite often during this time frame. This is the movie Franco shot at the same time and on the same sets as the bigger budgeted Barbed Wire Dolls, which is one of the all time greats of the genre.

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.

This is one of only two Jess Franco movies to have been banned in Britain during the "video nasties" scandal of the early 1980's, which only goes to show you that the BBFC (the British Board of Film Censors) needed to see A LOT more Jess Franco movies. This movie is pretty sick, but it is nowhere near as sick as earlier Franco WIP movies like "Barb-Wire Dolls" or "Greta, the Wicked Warden" (another Franco WIP movie "Women in Cellblock 9" was much more recently censored by the modern-day BBFC for underage nudity, and is currently unavailable in America at all).

This movie actually has a surprisingly intricate, if pretty off-the-wall, plot that kind of gets in the way of the depravity. After some diamonds are heisted from a Chinese junk, the only surviving thief is shot dead by his girlfriend "Shirley" (Lina Romay). The girlfriend is sentenced to a brutal prison, but many suspect she knows more than she's telling about the missing diamonds including the prison warden, who forces his prison snitch mistress to befriend "Shirley", and a crooked insurance investigator, who it turns out was in on what was to have been a fake heist before he and his partners were double-crossed by "Shirley" and her boyfriend.

The movie has the typical Francoesque longeurs of lesbian frolicking while the director performs the cinematic equivalent of a full body cavity search on the actresses with his beloved zoom lens. The two scenes that probably most incensed the BBFC though were the scenes of a naked woman being brutally whipped (old hat by the mid 1970's) and the scene of a naked Lina Romay receiving electroshocks in a very uncomfortable place (and I don't just mean the dank, barren cell). While this may seem the kind of incendiary mixture of violence and sex that tends to raise British censorial hackles, the violence is impossible to take seriously due to the incompetent film-making. The whip, for instance, leaves no mark on the girl in long shots but only in obviously fake close-ups, while the warden on the English-language soundtrack keeps demanding the prisoner "kneel down and beg forgiveness", despite the fact she's clearly chained to the ceiling. In the electroshock scene, Romay has her hands hand-cuffed in front of her and she could easily pull off the wire that is supposedly causing her searing pain (and as in "Barb Wire Dolls", her miming of electric convulsions is also pretty unconvincing). On the other hand, if there's anything at all "sexy" about these scenes it's simply that these women are nude at the time and have very nice bodies (especially Romay)--it has nothing to do with the ridiculous "torture" they're supposedly undergoing.

This movie didn't deserve the censorship it received, but conversely, it also doesn't deserve the fame/notoriety/whatever it has received for having been censored. It might be one of Franco's better WIP movies, but it's certainly not one of his best movies, and definitely not a great movie by any standard.