Una secondina in un carcere femminile

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.