Barbed Wire Dolls (1976)

Wonderful Movie

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

www.eattheblinds.comThere's a scene in Barbed Wire Dolls that is so perfectly horrible it should be cinematic legend. It's a young girl's flashback of her father (played by Franco himself) attempting to rape her. The entire scene is shot with Franco's patented wandering zoom, a lens slathered with vaseline and a slow motion effect you have to see to believe.Doing double-duty as "Cinematographer," Franco apparently didn't realize you could change the frame rate on the camera and decided slow motion is best acquired through slow motion acting. Yup, actors pretending to go through the motions in real time slow motion. Hilarious.For someone who hates his own movies and wishes he'd directed Citizen Kane, Franco's taste is not nearly as bad as the choices he consistently makes behind the camera. Within the realm of bad movies, if Ed Wood Jr. is Orson Welles, then Jess Franco is quite possibly John Ford. High praise, indeed. Barbed Wire Dolls is a B- movie with so many juicy tidbits of ineptness, tasteless raunch, camp and cliché you can't help but love this senseless mess. See the slow motion genius for yourself:

I thought that Barbed Wire Dolls was a good film The story is about a girl called Maria da Guerra who is sentenced to prison for life, after killing her father who had tried to rape her. On her arrival at the prison she is taken to a special section for mentally disturbed prisoners, where torture, rape and violence is a part of everyday life. One day the regional governor of the prison arrives, claiming that received a letter from one of the prisoners, describing the horrible events going on in the prison. Also Carlos Costa, who is a male nurse who is pretending to be the prison doctor. He falls in love with Maria who kills him with a pair of scissors. I thought that this was a very violent film, with some pretty strong senses of sex and nudity, that may be too much for some viewers.

Whenever I play DVD Russian roulette by plucking a film randomly from my collection and forcing myself to watch it, I prepare myself for the worst: with so many of prolific director Jess Franco's films clogging up my shelves, it's extremely likely that I'll end up popping one of his 'masterpieces' into the player.Last night, the metaphorical 'bullet in the chamber' was Barbed Wire Dolls, a sleazy women-in-prison flick starring Franco's fave piece of crumpet Lina Romay and a gaggle of wanton women all willing to flash some flesh on film for the pervy Spaniard.Romay plays female prisoner Maria da Guerra, imprisoned for the murder of her incestuous father (played by Franco himself in a faux slow-motion flashback scene that defies description). Persecuted by the monocle wearing lesbian in leather hot-pants who runs the prison (Monica Swinn), and mercilessly tortured by sadistic guard Nestor (Eric Falk), Maria eventually plans an escape from the hellhole, with a little help from pretty blonde cell-mate Bertha (Martine Stedil).This 'plot' serves as an excuse for Franco to depict countless scenes of laughable violence and sordid sex, including lesbian trysts, rape, and female masturbation, with the director's wild zoom lens performing close-up gynaecological examinations whenever possible.Whilst all this inept in-your-face sleaze is admittedly fun for a while, eventually, like so many of Franco's efforts, monotony sets in; towards the end of the film, even Franco himself seems to tire of the tasteless torture and endless crotch shots, and in order to end the tedium, he shoehorns a surprise (and rather daft) revelation into proceedings (Maria never killed her father; it was the directoress who was responsible) and wraps things up with an extremely abrupt ending.Like this.

Well, you can't openly declare that you like (or even enjoy) watching this type of movies because then – let's face it – you automatically get a stamp on your head that says 'potential threat to society'. Barbed Wire Dolls is a non-stop series of sex and violence that explicitly focuses on female nudity and sexual torture. The more reasonable reason to be interested in this film is the man who made it. Jesus Franco, the undeniable Godfather of sleaze takes on the ultra-controversial subject of 'Babes behind Bars' here. Franco is a remarkable director to say the least, with over 180 films on his repertoire as a director. Although this 'Barbed Wire Dolls' doesn't come close to his best achievements, it sure is memorable. But not exactly for the right reasons… The plot is thin to non-existent, it lacks range and feeling and there's no tension to detect. Even the typical exploitation-music (a must for films like this) is absent. Compared to what you might think, it isn't even THAT gross or nauseating. The film doesn't feature sequences of extreme bloodshed or severe mutilation. Instead, Barbed Wire Dolls only serves a lot of naked female beauty and absurd characters. We have the lesbian guard with obvious Nazi-tics, insane prisoners and fraudulent authority-figures. Oh, and let's not forget the falsely accused heroine and the remorseful male guard. Actually, Barbed Wire Dolls looked ideal to supply with a neutral rating. Like 4 or 5 out of 10…but then it got entirely spoiled by the abrupt and idiotic ending. Really, it looks like Franco all of a sudden got tired of it and just said: 'That's a wrap'. Maybe he had to hurry to another set…your agenda is pretty much filled with 180 movies to direct.