User Reviews

Women in Prison is infamous director Jess Franco's third, well, "women-in-prison" movie, following 99 Women and Barbed Wire Dolls. While it is by no means a good movie (no single film should have this many zoom shots), it is entertaining enough and moves along fast enough to never get boring.

Lina Romay plays a woman who's lover robs what he believes is a loot of jewels from a docked boat. When he arrives back at the restaurant they own, he discovers that the case he stole is empty. Romay shoots him, then calls the police and turns herself in.

What follows is standard W.I.P. fare. Romay has a lesbian tryst with her cellmate, nude women are whipped and tortured and the warden demands sexual favors from the prisoners. While it is strictly by-the-numbers for this type of movie, most of these scenes zip by at a good pace and there's no shortage of bare breasts and buttocks on display. Romay is slightly out of shape, which adds a touch of realism to her character, though most likely unintentionally.

Romay manages to escape and is surprised to be greeted with an unexpected getaway car (driven by director Jess Franco, in one of his many supporting roles). She finally meets up with her partner in crime and it is revealed that the whole thing was a set-up and he had the jewels all along. One thing that is never explained is why Romay's going to the prison was ever part of the plan! Regardless, logic and coherence are not things I am too worried about when watching a movie like this. It delivers what the title implies and at the compact running time of 80 minutes never really gets a chance to become tedious. Recommended for fans of the director or the subgenre. All others needn't bother.

Des Diamants Pour L'Enfer, or as the copy I saw was titled Women Behind Bars, starts on the 15th May, 1975 in a small Central American port where 3 masked bandits raid a boat named the 'Ding Hao' owned by eccentric millionaire Rufus Hackerman to steal a load of uncut diamonds, as the three make their getaway one of them named Perry Mendoza (Raymond Hardy) betrays the other two & shoots them dead. Perry then heads for a small nearby town called Santos where he owns a nightclub with his mistress Shirley Fields (Lina Romay), once there he discovers that the box he has stolen is empty & to add to his problems Shirley pulls a gun out & shoots him dead. Shirley then surrenders to her conscience, phones the police & admits everything. The courts go easy on Shirley because they feel it was a 'crime of passion' & sentence her to a mere 6 years in prison. Meanwhile Milton Warren (Roger Darton) who works for an insurance company is investigating the theft of the diamonds which were never recovered, he feels there is a connection between the missing diamonds & Shirley. However he is not the only one who thinks Shirley might know more than she's letting on with Warden Colonel Carlo de Bries (Ronald White) abusing his power to try & obtain the whereabouts of the valuable diamonds & uses his bit on the side Martine (Martine Stedil as Martine Steed) to befriend Shirley & extract the required information out of her & if that doesn't work he might have to resort to more drastic measures...

This French Belgium co-production according to the IMDb was supposedly photographed (on my version the 'director of photography' credit goes to Gerard Brissaud) & directed by Jesus Franco (again according to the IMDb under the pseudonym A.M. Frank but my in my version the 'directed by credit' goes to Rick Deconnink) & is as dull & amateurish as most of Franco's output is. The only real claim to fame that Des Diamants Pour L'Enfer has is that it was banned in Britain & placed on the 'Video Nasties' list which probably gives it some notoriety it most certainly doesn't deserve. The script is by Marius Lesoeur (my version says 'screenplay and adaptation by R.Marceignac' not that these mixed up credits matter but the IMDb isn't usually wrong but they are in this case) & is a real chore to sit through, while it actually tries to have a story it's so bland, dull & predictable that you end up wishing for Franco's trademark nudity of which there is very little in Des Diamants Pour L'Enfer. The film concentrates on the diamonds side of things & Shirley's attempts to escape more than the usual women in prison film themes like lesbianism, torture, sex, nudity & the exploitation of the female prisoners for our viewing pleasure. In fact Des Diamants Pour L'Enfer contains very little in the way of the smutty exploitation that Franco is notorious for, there are no proper sex scenes, there is not one single instance of lesbianism either, no lesbianism in a women in prison film? The only real nudity comes from the fact that the female inmates sleep naked & without the use of blankets while the violence & torture consists of one scene where a naked female prisoner is brutally whipped & when Shirley has her genital area electrocuted, that's it just two lame torture scenes during the entire 75 minute duration, disappointing. The so-called twist ending is so obvious you can tell it's coming as soon as Shirley turns herself in within the first 5 minutes, Milton conducts his entire investigation from his hotel room to save on location expenses & he also narrates several passages which Franco just uses as a cheap way of explaining what's happening, the prison doesn't even look like a prison more of a holiday resort or large Villa & those flimsy fences wouldn't even stop my Mother from escaping. To add the the general tedium of the film & story Franco proves yet again he should be directing traffic rather than films with lots of pointless establishing shots of houses, mountains, people's faces & lingers on them for what seems like ages occasionally adding the odd jerky pan across a landscape & his usual uneven zooms in & out, all these scenes just feel like padding & add nothing to the film, yawn. There is no action to speak of & as a whole Les Diamants Pour L'Enfer is a real waste of time & film stock. The music sucks as well. This is typical Franco crap that seems to be pretty obscure & after you've had to endure it for 75 minutes you'll understand why, all I can say is be thankful that Des Diamants Pour L'Enfer is so hard to get a copy of. Total crap & the only reason I give it 2 stars instead of 1 is because I've sat through even worse films than this, unbelievable as that sounds.

Women Behind Bars feels like a movie you may have seen before and that's probably due to the fact that Jess Franco seemed to make the same movie over and over. Diamond theft? Women going to jail? More to the point, Lina Romay thrown in jail? Yes, I've seen it, you may have seen it, but I'm going to keep watching these movies because in a world that makes no sense, the movies of Jess Franco that make no sense make sense.

In "Stop Making Sense," David Byrne sang "Don't touch me I'm a real live wire," and hey, Lina kind of lives that in this movie, Lina doesn't just the zoom in with the camera nearly so deep into her private parts that you can see her soul, she also has them zapped with electro shock therapy. I mean, you always hurt the ones you love, and Jess Franco should have invented a new word for love for how he felt about Lina, and still here we are watching her body shake and shiver as she approximates what it had to feel like to get some volts up her lady business.

I mean, is this movie Jess Franco makes Swamp Diamonds? Sure, maybe. Yet even Roger Corman would say, "Maybe this needs some budget," and Jess wouldn't be listening because he'd be shooting an endless image of a sunset.

Speaking of hurt, Jess plays a gangster that wants those diamonds and so he roughs up Lina to the point that you're sure that the camera went off and they had really great sex after. And hey - the man that Lina kills is her Ramon Ardid, who was her husband at the time and man, awkward. You ever had an emotional relationship with someone that ends up becoming real and want to shut the rest of the world out and only have your reality exist of just the two of you? Ramon's been on the wrong side of that.

I mean, outside of a few sapphic scenes and that electrocution, this movie is more a crime film than a women in prison movie, so leave it to Jess Franco to take a movie that seems to promise sleaze* and edging you.

*To be fair, it's still sleazy enough to be a section 2 video nasty.

Cunning and duplicitous moll Shirley Fields (Lina Romay at her most fetching and sultry) winds up serving six years in a penitentiary after she shoots her jewel thief boyfriend dead in what she claims to be a crime of passion. Naturally, Shirley's brash nature doesn't go over well with the sadistic prison staff.

Director Jess Franco, working from a sordid script by Marius Lesoeur, keeps the usually complex, yet still entertainingly trashy story moving along at a steady pace, maintains a gloomy tone throughout, and pulls off a neat surprise ending. Moreover, Franco not only delivers a satisfying smattering of tasty gratuitous female nudity (the inmates all sleep in the nude!), but also further treats the audience to leering zoom-in close-ups of hairy distaff nether regions, a scorching lesbian make-out session, and even some brutal torture set pieces that include a bloody whipping and Shirley receiving electric shocks to her breasts and groin. Buxom blonde babe Martine Stedil lends sturdy support as Shirley's chummy cell mate Martine, Ronald Weiss makes for a suitably hateful villain as strict and vicious warden Carlos de Bries, and Franco acquits himself well in a sizable role as ruthless mobster Bill. Franco's sharp widescreen cinematography and Daniel White's groovy jazz score are both up to par. Fans of Franco's sleazefests should dig this one.

Lina Romay looks stunning in this, possibly more so than in any Franco film I've yet seen. Here, she lends her not inconsiderable acting talents to play Shirley Fields, whom we first meet as she kills her thief boyfriend before being sentenced to six year's imprisonment. Once incarcerated, the prison snitch Martine (Martine Stedil) is given the job of getting close to her and trying to find out about the diamonds missing in the latest robbery.

Martine and Shirley spend most of their time swapping cigarettes and smoking them whilst naked. Jess himself makes one of his regular appearances as thug overlord Bill. Ronald Weiss is another cast-member of note, playing the seedy Carlo de Bries. There's a moment of prison sex when Martine and Shirley suddenly become lesbians. It takes a special skill to make lesbian love scenes between these two beautiful women entirely un-erotic, but 'Women Behind Bars' manages it. As far as torture - something Women In Prison dramas pride themselves in - there is some whipping, and some particularly invasive punishment for our Shirley.

The downside of the production is, unsurprisingly, the dubbing, with lines being spat out staccato style, and often two characters will talk over each other. Daniel White, musician veteran of so many Franco films, turns in a lacklustre score here. Shades of lounge/jazz music, often sounding as if it comes from a single keyboard. The story itself is fairly thin and, although this is only Franco third 'Women in Prison' film, his directorship seems only occasionally inspired this time round.

The upside is that Romay carries the film well. Shirley is required to suffer a lot throughout, seemingly at the hands of whomever she meets. It could only be discreetly suggested that she enjoys it. And in a SPOILER, it works out for her in the end, giving the 'heroine' (if that is what she is) a refreshingly happy ending. Whilst the 'prison' looks a little too much like a hotel, the darkened tunnel leading to and fro (possibly filmed somewhere else entirely) looks suitably drab and austere. More of a crime caper than the more standard WIP piece, this emerges as enjoyable, but pretty mild Franco fare.