Frauengefängnis (1976)

AKA Barbed Wire Dolls

Jailhouse Wardress will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on October 24 via MVD's Classics line. The 1981 women-in-prison movie is known in its native France as Les gardiennes du pénitencier.

Alain Deruelle writes and directs with additional footage helmed by Jess Franco (Vampyros Lesbos). Lina Romay, Monica Swinn, and Paul Müller star.

Pre-order Jailhouse Wardress.

Put On Your Raincoats | The Seduction of Amy (Rollin, 1975)

This review contains mild spoilers.

I want to start off by disclosing that I did not watch this in ideal conditions. One, the version I watched was dubbed, and not elegantly so. Two, it appeared to be truncated, running at least twenty minutes shorter than the runtime listed on IMDb. Three, it was less than pristine visually, appearing to be both cropped, and taken from a worn down VHS copy struck from a deteriorated print, with the colour scheme all out of whack. Imagine your TV screen is cracked and smeared with vaseline, and someone has messed up your display settings and hidden the remote, and you’ll get an idea of what it looked like. Four (yes, four), there was a weird buzzing on the audio, as if a bee had snuck into your TV, likely through the crack in the screen, and was now rattling around the inside of your set, getting especially agitated whenever the characters started talking. So perhaps I will not do the movie justice, and I would like to see a version in a better state, but on the whole I actually didn’t mind it.

This is a hardcore porno directed by Jean Rollin, known mostly for his softcore-tinged vampire films. His hardcore features don’t seem terribly easy to come by in decent looking, subtitled copies, so I was willing to give this a shot even in a less than ideal state, given that it was dubbed in English. What’s interesting is that even in this state, you can see his style come through. When I think of Rollin’s movies, I think of a certain elegance and lightness of touch. One might guess that such a quality might be hard to grasp in a hardcore feature, especially when watching such a shitty looking and sounding copy, but here it manifests in how he frames his characters in their environments. He emphasizes how small the characters are, enhancing their sense of isolation in their comparatively cavernous settings. It’s the visual equivalent of screaming out into the void and hearing an echo. This is set in a chateau that once belonged to the Marquis de Sade, and where other directors might emphasize the sense of decadence and excess, the effect Rollin goes for is a bit more eerie, and by the end maybe a little poignant (the latter at least in intent, if not in execution). He even sneaks that sense of framing into the sex scenes, which are mostly shot in the standard hardcore style of the era, but every once in a while the camera pulls back and you get a certain charge out of seeing the characters in their striking settings. I don’t know if I’d call that charge erotic, but it’s something.

I understand Rollin would cast cast certain performers in both his horror films and his pornos (Brigitte Lahaie, the most iconic actress to appear in his movies, first worked with him on a porno before he cast her in The Grapes of Death; sadly, I haven’t been able to track a copy of that porno down with either English subtitles or audio, which is my punishment for forgetting all the French I learned in public school). The actresses I immediately recognized were the Castel sisters, who are first seen hiking and giggling when one of them stops to take a leak, and later find themselves in the chateau where one of undresses the other and pushes her into a group of naked people, and then gets spanked by the one she pushed as revenge, before they both partake in a threesome. I will note that the spanking is more comedic than perverted in tone, although if you have a thing for either sister, you will likely get something out of these scenes. I will admit that I couldn’t tell which one is which, which would definitely be a problem were we to go on a double date. (Rely on the fourth person to distinguish the two, you say? Well, in this insane hypothetical where I’m on a date with the Castel sisters, it’s an ‘80s sitcom or Doctor Detroit style scenario where I’m running between both ends of a restaurant trying to do a dinner date with both at the same time. You see the dilemma here.) Monica Swinn also makes an appearance at the very end, although it’s possible she has more screentime in the longer cut.

Now, my experience with French pornos from the era is that there’s been a certain condescension that’s popped up in a bunch of them, where the movies chide the characters for their desires. For what it’s worth, Rollin plays this with some sincerity, and tries to wrest the conclusion on the heroine falling in love with the count who resides in the chateau. I’m not sure it works, as the movie doesn’t flesh out their mutual attraction enough to sell it (perhaps the longer cut succeeds here), as what we see of his brutal treatment of his previous love raises a colossal red flag (I’m not here to kink shame, but the extent to which he beats her does not seem like a healthy and safe execution of BDSM), but I appreciate the effort. And when Evelyne Thomas stares right into camera and speaks of her trepidation about love, maybe I wasn’t entirely immune to the intended effect. Now, I did watch this for Spooky Season viewing, and at least the version I saw isn’t that heavy on the horror, as we only get a few hints of BDSM AKA spooky sex (perhaps there’s more in the longer cut). But we do get scenes where the characters walk down dark and creepy corridors, in flowy sorta see-through robes (somewhere between transparent and translucent), with only a candle for light, and well, that’s some prime horror movie atmosphere.

The Duke of Burgundy: Directed by Peter Strickland. With Chiara D'Anna, Kata Bartsch, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Monica Swinn. A woman who studies butterflies and moths tests the limits of her relationship with her lesbian lover.

Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer

Frauengefängnis

Barbed Wire Dolls (1976)

Happy Franco Friday!

barbed wire dolls (1976)

Barbed Wire Dolls

Lina Romay and Monica Swinn in Female Vampire (La comtesse noire, 1973).

Bad movie I have The Demoniacs 1974 original title Les demoniaques

Put On Your Raincoats | Draguse (Rhomm, 1976)

This more or less falls into porno-horror territory, which sounds like you’re getting two great flavours that taste great together, but I don’t think this is a particularly effective example of the subgenre. The horror is applied with what can be generously called a light touch. I’ve only seen one other Patrice Rhomm movie, and I’d wager that he isn’t the most forceful of stylists, and the atmosphere here is not thick enough to cut with a knife. There’s also the fact that there’s an awful lot of padding, in terms of street footage, driving footage, amusement park footage and what have you. To be honest I didn’t mind seeing Paris in the ‘70s, particularly the seedier locations the hero visits to look for inspiration for the erotic novels he’s been commissioned to write. Alas I didn’t note down all the titles of the porno movies playing at the different theatres, but it was a little jarring to see that a Planet of the Apes sequel was playing next door to a sex film.

That being said, I did enjoy this enough, in large part thanks to Monica Swinn, a regular of Jess Franco’s films. I don’t think Rhomm uses her as well as Franco, but I still found her a pleasing screen presence, and found endearing her attempts to sell the sometimes awkward, sometimes noxious material. (Rhomm’s lack of forcefulness means we get a lot more of the former than the latter. An example presents itself in the first few minutes, when the hero dreams of being seduced by Swinn, who awkwardly gyrates to jazzy music in a shot that’s framed off centre.) And more importantly, she goes through a number of amazing outfits, from various gowns that blend spooky with sexy, to a nightie that doesn’t cover her pubes, to a grey sweater and dress combo that she matches with glasses, boots and a bob.

There’s an element of genre satire here, in that the hero struggles to find inspiration for his novels and most of the sources he tries to mine are idiotic and cliché-ridden. The best stretch of the movie is when Swinn (in dowdy bob, glasses and grey combo mode) comes to help him write his books and comes up with one idea after another more devious than any he could conjure. In the hands of a better director, this could have been shaped into something with a lot more erotic charge or a sharper sense of gender commentary, but Rhomm uses it for halfassed but sort of entertaining riffs on different sexploitation scenarios. Oddly enough, I don’t think this even would have been good jerkoff material for the raincoat brigade, as most of this is softcore with some obvious stuntcocking when it goes hardcore, and in typical French porn fashion, there’s an element of humour or condescension in some of the scenes. So I don’t think any of this will shock you or get your motor running, but if you enjoy Swinn as a screen presence you should have a good enough time.

Having recently released a collection of DVDs from cult filmmaker Jess Franco (Vampyros Lesbos), Full Moon Features is now upgrading the titles to Blu-ray. Kicking off series is Barbed Wire Dolls (also known as Caged Women), which is available now.

The 1976 women-in-prison exploitation film has been digitally remastered from the negative. Lina Romay, Monica Swinn, and Paul Müller star, with Franco himself in a small role.

Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio interview with The Duke of Burgundy director Peter Strickland discussing the films of Jess Franco

Vintage Jess Franco VHS trailer reel

Jess Franco favorite and lifelong muse Lina Romay stars as the wide-eyed Maria, an unfortunate young woman who kills her father (played by Franco) in self defense after he attempts to rape her. She is tried, sentenced and shipped off to what is perhaps the grisliest, greasiest and most depraved women’s penitentiary in screen history where, at the hands, fingers and fists of psychotic lesbian warden Monica Swinn, she and her fellow inmates are subjected to an endless onslaught of perverse psychological and sexual abuse.

Barbed Wire Dolls (1976)

Happy Franco Friday!