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.
