Franco Files: Mädchen im Nachtverkehr / ‘Girls of the Night Traffic’ (1976)

Of the innumerable sex comedies and caged women exploitation pics produced by Erwin C. Dietrich’s Switzerland-based Ascot/Elite productions during the 1970s, most prove fairly dismal viewing (to my tastes at least). The presence of Jess Franco and Lina Romay on the payroll did at least lead to Dietrich’s company names appearing on a handful of masterpieces and the occasional slice of out-of-nowhere weirdness though – and in the latter category, 1976’s ‘Mädchen im Nachtverkehr’, rather awkwardly translated as ‘Girls of the Night Traffic’, proves a case in point.

This certainly wasn’t one of Franco’s more personal projects for Dietrich – indeed, there seems to be some controversy over how much of it he was actually responsible for, with Dietrich taking credit as writer and co-director on IMDB – but I think that the oddball humour and general garish surrealism found within makes Jess’s contribution clear, adding interest and a sense of campy enjoyment to what would otherwise be a pretty forgettable shot-in-a-week softcore(ish) quickie.

Taking place in a bouncy comic-book world of guilt-free sex and commerce, the story here is thin bordering on non-existent, and centres upon three happy hookers (the only one of whom I recognise is Franco regular Kali Hansa), who lounge around naked on a big bed in their shared flat, recalling stories of adventures with their more unusual clients. I can’t speak for the way the girls’ banter scans in the original German, but the English fan-subs on my copy have them spouting some of the most mystifyingly overwrought double-entendres I’ve ever encountered in a motion picture;

“He rooted around in the belltower. It was sensational.”

“He modestly asked me if I would perform the trumpet angel for him. Why not?”

“I won’t do shock treatment with you. I’ll do ‘shell-seeking’, that’s easy.”

What does it all mean? Don’t tell me, I think I’m happier not knowing.

One brief vignette sees Hansa servicing a Dr. Hichcock-like character who has her reclining in a coffin previously occupied by his late wife, on what looks like an empty, black-draped sound stage, whilst funereal music drones on in the background. The sheer unexpectedness of all this renders it quite fun, and things take a further turn taking a turn toward the bizarre when the man appears to introduce his penis as “mein gondola” and begins shouting “gondola! gondola!” as he thrusts away once the inevitable action commences. Inadequately translated German slang, or just random weirdness? Again, I think I’m happier not knowing.

Meanwhile, another of the girls makes a date with the always slightly terrifying Eric Falk, who here presents an even more unwholesome presence than usual as a sexually inexperienced and apparently mentally deficient foreigner, who says things like “if it not cost too much, I make love, yes?” This is not quite so much fun, but, um…. ok.

Back at the shack, a lengthy sequence of sexy banana eating and sapphic frolics ensues (“honestly, we never get bored”, says someone), until the film suddenly plunges headfirst into the depths of Franco’s erotic-fantastique imagination for a positively dream-like sequence in which one of the girls suddenly finds herself trapped in a bamboo cage amid a set-bound jungle, before the other two approach in military uniforms (presumably recycled from Barbed Wire Dolls, or some similar picture), and things proceed in much the kind of direction you’d expect... until the scope of the scene widens out to reveal that this is actually a stage act being performed in some totally bizarre jungle-themed neon nightclub!

A trademark Franco trick of course, but used to maximum reality-trashing effect here, giving the impression that we’re suddenly adrift in the void, roaming through one of the innumerable such rooms that must be continually operating in the director’s mind.

In a subsequent flashback demonstrating how the girls fell into their current occupation, one of them is seen tootling away on a saxophone, practicing in the hope that she won’t lose her current job in a brass band – another self-referential wink to the mere handful of weirdoes whom one assumes might have been following Jess Franco’s career back in 1976 – before Hansa’s character barges in on the pretext that she’s a burglar trying to rob the place!

Introducing the third member of the trio, we cut to yet another thoroughly goofy vignette in an artist’s studio, where girl # 1 is trying her luck as an artist’s model and attracts the attention of the artist’s daughter/lover (her precise role is deliberately left a bit vague, as if the filmmakers hit on the icky incest theme but didn’t quite want to go all the way with it, or else just forgot or something).

 “It’s nice painting her thighs, when one is used to yours”, says the leery, pencil-moustached artist at one point, and once again, an avalanche of questionable euphemisms add a whole extra layer of strangeness here. “One always looks forward to the opening of a theatre”, says one of the girls when the fella unzips his pants, “but be gentle on the hero, he’s suffering from stage fright”. The camp factor is pushed even further by cut-away close ups to the guy’s paintings, which are absolutely HIDEOUS – air-brushed monstrosities full of fawns and dewy eyed sheep… just wonderfully absurd.

Toward the end of the film, a rather unsavory storyline emerges that kinda anticipates scenarios which were re-used for 1977’s superior ‘Die Sklavinnen’ (aka ‘Swedish Nympho Slaves’), in which the girls are kidnapped one by one by a swinging couple and sold on to Eric Falk’s character (see, I TOLD you he wasn’t to be trusted!), who is working for a cadre of Islamic white slavers who hang out in a smoky Turkish restaurant where some intense-looking musicians choogle away day and night on sitar and tablas (because India, Turkey – close enough, right?).

Here, in a turn of events that ranks pretty high on the list of “scenes you’d be unlikely to see in a motion picture nowadays”, the malevolent, fez-wearing Turks pound away doggy-style at their bored captives whilst yelling allegedly comedic variations on Muslim prayer mantras. The whole thing is so stunningly tasteless it’s kind of extraordinary, to be honest. Indefensible, undoubtedly, but at the same time, the knowingly ludicrous, slapstick presentation leaves it only a stone’s throw away from the kind of outrages a young John Waters was perpetrating at around the same time on the other side of the Atlantic.

If you’ve got a strong enough exploitation-stomach to shrug off a few light-hearted Islamophobic rape scenes though, the rest of ‘Girls of the Night Traffic’ remains 60-something minutes of utterly stupid, frivolous fun – the kind of sex flick that constantly objectifies the female body (that sort of being its core purpose, after all), but without ever feeling the need to get cruel or gross about it, and that slings random elements and jarring, inexplicable diversions together seemingly at random, with no apparent rhyme or reason, leaving us completely in the dark re: what’s coming next.

Though in essence the film is perhaps only marginally sillier than the innumerable hours of Germanic softcore nonsense that emerged from the ‘70s, we can assume that Franco at least was fully aware of the ridiculousness of the project he was involved in, and my guess is that he was deliberately ramping up the camp factor here as far as he possibly could, leading to the kind of movie where you can almost hear the cast & crew cracking up off-screen at the kind of nonsense they’re being paid to create.

On the downside, Francophiles should note that the film suffers from an absolutely chronic lack of Lina, which immediately loses it a point or two in the ‘Kink’ category (who knows, maybe she was visiting family or something on the week they made this one?), but that aside, if you are the kind of person who would even contemplate acquiring and watching a film like this in the 21st century, then god knows, you will probably enjoy it.

----
Kink – 3/5 
Creepitude – 1/5 
Pulp Thrills – 3/5 
Altered States – 2/5 
Sight-seeing – 0/5
---

FRANCO FILES: Doriana Gray(1976)

AKA:
‘Die Marquise von Sade’, ‘Le Portrait de Doriana Gray’, ‘Le Porno Storia della Marchesa De Sade’.

Context:

“I hinted at the calamity of my birth – that will have to suffice.”

Jess Franco’s career has seen him dabble in an unholy array of genres and styles over the years, but if you were to ask me hand on heart where his greatest contribution to cinema lies, I’d probably point toward the series of often quite disturbing psychological sex films he made in early/mid-70s, mostly under the auspices of producer Robert de Nesle, and with Lina Romay front and centre in the cast list. Building on the template he’d established with his career-defining late ‘60s run of erotic horror/thrillers, but pushing things in ever more extreme and obsessive directions as censorship loosened and budgets lessened, this vague series could be said to include ‘Lorna The Exorcist’, ‘Sinner’, ‘The Obscene Mirror’, ‘Shining Sex’, and, later, ‘Macumba Sexual’. But the unsavoury carnal fixations Franco was exploring in these films arguably reached their peak of expression with the title we’re looking at today – a contender for the most intensely claustrophobic and fleshy entry in the entire Franco filmography… which is saying something.

Generally speaking, the films Franco made for Erwin Deitrich in the latter half of the ‘70s mark the point at which he abandoned the more personal / experimental streak that had prevailed earlier in the decade, and began churning out tawdry exploitation and cheap genre exercises in earnest. There are definitely some noteworthy exceptions though, and ‘Doriana..’ ranks highest among them. It seems likely it was shot around the same time as ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ (most of the same cast reappear with the same haircuts, and the locations & cinematography seem fairly similar), but, oh, what a difference!

Content:

“For as long I can remember, I’ve been living in the chateau… when I go for walks after long, lonely, dreamless night, I hear no human voices, only the laughter of a mocking bird..”

As you might reasonably expect, only the flimsiest suggestion of Oscar Wilde’s novel survives in this tale of siamese twins (both played by Lina Romay), separated at birth in a botched operation that we’re told resulted in both ‘damaged nerve fibres’ and ‘lost minds’.

Unscathed on the surface at least, Lady Doriana has grown up to become a reclusive aristocrat and mythic sexual libertine, but her mentally deficient twin, long forgotten by everyone, hasn’t been quite so lucky. Confined to an asylum in what seems to be a perpetual state of delusional sexual frenzy, she is a howling mad, naked wretch – the reverse mirror image of Doriana’s outwardly icy, refined demeanour, her rampant id personified in full fury.

As Doriana drifts through life, wrestling with loneliness and her inability to truly ‘feel’ anything in the course of her frequent, impersonal sexual encounters, she finds herself becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the malign psychic influence of her ‘shadow’, and when her lovers begin to die at the point of climax, their life energies drained and consumed, well… obviously we’re talking about a Jess Franco film here, so a bit of self control, some long walks in the country and cold showers etc, are not really on the menu.

In terms of Franco genealogy, ‘Doriana Gray’ recycles much of its general business from ‘Female Vampire’ (the lone aristocratic wonderer who leaves her lovers dead, the presence of an intrusive reporter, the mixture of frenzied sex scenes and brooding, ethereal weirdness etc.), and its basic plot-line would soon be re-worked in far more light-weight fashion for the self-explanatory ‘Sexy Sisters’. Despite this though, ‘Doriana..’, like all of Franco’s best films, is very much its own beast – a wholly unique experience, even as it rampages over territory that will prove over-familiar to even the director’s more casual fans.

Kink:

“Don’t go… stay here and look… I have a little mound, and a valley deeper than the village well, and breasts you could crack an egg on..”

It is a common line of thinking when looking at the emergence of explicit sex films in the ‘70s to see them as essentially stifling the creativity of the filmmakers who chose to partake in them – killing all momentum stone-dead, reducing potentially talented directors to mere camera pointers, filming ugly, static camera fuck scenes when they could be doing something far better with their time, and so on and so forth.

Doubtless there were some individuals for whom this was the case (Jean Rollin is perhaps a good example), but the establishment of a viable market for pornographic films actually seems to have had the opposite effect on Jess Franco, allowing him to get straight to the heart (or rather, straight to the crotch) of what really made him tick, as the distant and sometimes distracted feel of his ‘60s work began to mutate into something both far more graphic and far more emotionally involving, resulting in a crude but startlingly uncompromising form of low budget cinema – unsettlingly perverse, genuinely erotic and so relentlessly voyeuristic that even Europe’s most dedicated porno freaks must have started to wish he’d pull the bloody camera back for a bit of fresh air every now and then.

In essence I think, Franco was (and hopefully still is) an old fashioned sensualist – a man who lives for the pleasures of music, food, culture, cinema, travel, and women. (And, whatever you might think of his movies, you’ve got to at least admire the way he managed to shape his career as a film director into a routine that allowed him to indulge all of these passions on a regular basis.)

It is natural therefore that his more personal films should reflect this approach to life. And as he reached what the more pretentious amongst us might wish to term his ‘mature style’ in the early ‘70s, it is hardly surprising that he should begin to address the ugly shadows that are always lurking in the corner when decadent behaviour is taken to extremes.* Y’know - mental and physical collapse, guilt and moral turpitude, addiction and loss of sensation, madness, despair – that sort of thing. Not a path that’s often much explored by conventional pornography, for obvious reasons, but the genius of a film like ‘Doriana Gray’ is that it manages to cut right to the quick of such heavy subject matter whilst still functioning as lusty, grade A erotica that leaves 90% of the other filmmakers attempting such stuff in the dust.

Much of the credit for allowing the film to successfully straddle (if you will) this gap between arousal and disgust lies of course with the wonderful Ms Romay. I don’t know whether I’ve thus far had a chance in these reviews to pay tribute to the astonishing presence Lina Romay brings to Franco’s ‘70s films… but then I don’t know if the feeling conveyed by her performances in movies like this one can even really be communicated in words. I mean, I’m not usually the kind of guy to get all misty-eyed about actresses in adult movies and so forth, but - those who have seen her in ‘Female Vampire’ or ‘Lorna’ or even the Dietrich-directed ‘Rolls Royce Baby’ will know what I’m getting at.

It would be easy to put the strength of her performances down to her apparent exhibitionistic tendencies and seemingly endless enthusiasm for appearing in this kind of material (a rare virtue indeed in the patriarchal and oft-abusive world of smutty movies), but I don’t know if that quite covers it. Let’s just say that Lina operates on a whole other level from anyone else I have ever seen try to do ‘sexy’ in front of a movie camera. Even when it in the midst of the ‘action’, she seems able to unleash a reservoir of raw, amped up emotion that goes way beyond the standard male-fantasy moves usually demanded by such scenes. Without wishing to labour the point, I would defy anyone of a woman-fancying persuasion – hell, anyone period – to sit through one of her peak-era performances without experiencing *some* kind of strong reaction. If not necessarily sexual arousal, then fear, unease, mesmerism, hilarity, repulsion and wordless fascination are all equally valid responses, just as they are valid responses to Franco’s cinema as a whole. But just like his camera, you won’t be able to ignore her, that’s for sure.

And speaking of Franco’s ever-roaming phallic gaze, ‘Doriana..’ is also notable for taking the director’s penchant for genital close ups to a level of absolute insanity, frequently zooming to the point of utter pubic oblivion, ensuring that Lina’s bush gets as many close-ups as her face. Actually, one or the other of them is on screen for practically the entire movie, an approach that could have taken on a horribly invasive quality in the hands of most other filmmakers, but as is often the case, Jess’s fleshy obsessions play out here in a manner than seems more worshipful than demeaning, and that fits the film’s densely claustrophobic, internalised narrative pretty well.

That said, I’m afraid there are some pretty grim moments here too (in particular, a grisly hetero scene between Raymond Hardy and Martine Stedil nearly made me lose my lunch), but whenever Lina is on screen in either of her incarnations, the sparks fly. 4/5

Creepitude:

“Tell me, is this girl in the clinic of the mysterious Dr. Orlof your sister? Is she insane? Is she a nymphomaniac?”

As was discussed in my review of ‘Macumba Sexual’, what makes Jess Franco’s particular brand of sex-horror films work so well is that, rather than presenting us with a horror film plus some sex (or vice versa), he hits us head-first with a scenario in which the sex IS the horror, internalised within the characters partaking of it.

In these films, sexual dementia (as a symptom of Franco’s preferred notion of carnal vampirism) seems to travel through the air like some kind of psychic plague, emanating from the ‘bearers’ (Doriana and her twin) and possessing each character in turn, as logic crumbles, naked writhing becomes an epidemic and the world becomes a very frightening and disorientating place indeed, reality reduced to “an incoherent nightmare of sex”, to borrow a choice phrase from the Westminster Gazette’s memorable dismissal of Arthur Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’.

Although the deaths of Doriana’s lovers are pretty perfunctory here – more implied than graphically depicted – it is the sex scenes that surround them, and Lina’s performances within them, that form the main source of the horror, as we’re treated (and/or subjected) to perhaps Romay’s single most unhinged, uninhibited performance in a career full of unhinged, uninhibited performances – a visceral and terrifying portrayal of mental collapse that sometimes cuts too close for comfort, channeling a nameless catharsis worthy of a Zulawski film.

As befits ‘Doriana Gray’s schizophrenic themes, the film’s overall effect relies heavily on Lina’s trademark move of shifting her expression in a split second from euphoric ecstasy to pain, to mindless screaming madness - capturing the viewer off-guard in that awful, frozen moment when the music warps or vanishes in a strangulated echo effect, as our assumption that you’re watching a decadent, easy-going sex scene falls away, twisting a knot in our stomach as we’re forced to suddenly recalibrate our expectations, before we look back again and realise that Doriana is panting, staring blindly with glazed eyes, drooling on the corpse of her partner, as the camera cuts to her incarcerated sister’s inhuman primal scream… oof.

In between these encounters, the atmosphere cools off, and we’re treated (in the rather bizarre English dub at least) to an eerie, monotone voiceover that works to effectively somnambulant effect, elucidating Doriana’s thoughts in the form of some rather Poe-like brooding soliloquys, as she explains her understanding of her sister’s psychic domination in terms of a gothic curse, outlining the long history of genius, melancholy and madness that have tormented the women of her family for generations, taking a leaf or two from Vincent Price in ‘House of Usher’ in the process, and rather unexpectedly investing the film with a rich, ennui-wracked gothic tone, reminiscent of Franco’s earlier ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’. 4/5

Pulp Thrills:

“A lady as smart as you are, who owns a whole publishing house for erotic memoirs, isn’t gonna indulge in tiddlywinks..”

Not much doing from this angle I fear. In the film’s lighter moments there’s certainly fun to be had with the goofy English dub (see the quotes at the top of these sections), and with the idea of a world where reclusive aristocratic publishers of erotic memoirs engage in off-the-cuff lesbian seductions at the drop of a hat. But relentless genital close-ups and screaming, demonic hysteria do rather tend to distract from the ol’ pulp thrills I find. 1/5

Altered States:

“I am endowed with an unlimited lust for pleasure, which is the secret of eternal youth..”

Mention must initially be made of the incredible, minimalist sitar-rocking score from Walter Baumgartner**, mainly consisting of just a few languid, resonating notes that repeat throughout the film, hanging in the air like some attempt at a melodic progression left forever unresolved as its composer drifted off into stoned slumber.

Also contributing to a heavy-ass psychedelic atmosphere are all the usual tricks Franco utilises to squeeze as much oppressive disorientation out of his tropical paradise locations as he possible can: palpable heat haze, abstract close-ups and drifting, variable focus. Blinding, overlit sunshine and black, impenetrable shadows (often combined in the same shot). Baroque mirror shots fill the screen with jagged, conflicting angles whilst distant, fuzzy yachts bob back and forth on the tide of the picture-book harbour, as all the time that infernal sitar twangs away, never quite finding the right note it needs to finish things off.

Soon even the genital close-ups begin to take on an abstract, alien character, as frantic zoom shots fill the screen with beige blurs, strange goose-pimpled landscapes and stray pubic hairs curling in the foreground like spider webs, as Franco's lust inspires him to simultaneously break every conceivable rule of cinematic etiquette.

On the soundtrack meanwhile, a constant, deafening chatter of canned birdcalls, hooting owls and mewling cats mixes with the hypnotic voiceovers of the English dub track, as Lina’s vocal stand-in recites verses from a totally tripped out Wickerman-style plain song nursery rhyme (“Your hands wave like a bird’s wings, but they cannot grasp the stars”).

One particularly incredible moment combines all of this, as thunder rolls overhead and the creepy singing continues, as Franco zeros in on a rainbow shining in an overcast sky above a row of slummy looking apartment buildings, contrasted with a monolith-like fern leaf (or maybe it’s an overturned parasol or something?) in the foreground. The camera pulls back to reveal Lina’s shadowed form, encased entirely in shadow as she walks forward, away from us… “your rainbow coloured eyes… dive into the blinding light..” intones the disembodied voice as the shape of Lina’s fuzzy black breasts depart stage left and the camera zooms further into the clouds and the slowly fading rainbow…

I hear Kubrick’s people put a lot of time and effort into that hyper-space sequence from the end of ‘2001’. Franco just grabbed his camera one day and looked out of the hotel window. I think I’m give them about a draw in the psychedelic stakes. 5/5

Sight-seeing:

I’m not sure where ‘Doriana Gray’ was shot, but the setting has a tropical sort of look to it that adds weight to my theory that it was filmed back to back with ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ in Central America, or possibly the Caribbean. The scenes set inside Doriana’s chateau though also recall the kind of Moorish splendour Franco often captured so well in Spanish and Portuguese locales – especially the echoing marble entrance hall, wrought iron railings etc. – but I guess it’s equally possible that such architecture might have been replicated in some grand, colonial outpost across the Atlantic or whatever. So the jury’s out, but it’s all pretty nice to look at anyway. 3/5

Conclusion:

If you’ll allow me a bit of a generalisation, most of the international film industry’s attempts to sell ‘sophisticated’ erotic films to a wider audience during the 1970s were a total bore, producing movies that were tacky, thoughtless and decidedly un-erotic, irrespective of the veneer of ‘class’ that was crow-barred into them. What a difference then to witness Jess Franco at the top of his game here, working pretty much single-handedly with extremely limited means and singularly grimy technique, but managing to craft a sex film that is visually stunning, emotionally devastating, thematically coherent, and that could probably give a corpse a hard-on. That it probably never got an airing outside of the kind of unimaginable flea-pit porno houses that presumably ran these Deitrich hardcore flicks, whilst down the road semi-respectable citizens could have been flocking to see some worn out Emmanuelle/Story of O derivative, is something of a tragedy, if a wholly predictable one.

I mean, in many ways this is a pretty difficult film to watch, and probably something of a head-fuck for those unfamiliar with Franco’s general mode of operation; but for any existing fans out there who’ve yet to see this one, be assured that it’s just about the most uncompromising, undiluted dose of Franco genius business you could hope to find from the mid ‘70s, and pretty much a definitive statement of where he was heading through the first half of that decade.


*Not that I believe Franco himself ever took his behaviour to extremes, I should make clear – as far as I’m aware, he has always been a very moderate, well behaved and agreeable sort of fellow. In fact in some ways, you might say that the true genius of his life lies in the way he found a legitimate excuse to spend about thirty years hanging out in tropical beauty spots, listening to hot jazz and staring at naked ladies all day, without ever even having to act like a jerk.

** Herr Baumgartner appears to have provided music for pretty much every Erwin Dietrich related Swiss/German sex film released between 1970 and 1990, leading me to initially suspect he might be a pseudonym used to cover for the use of recycled and/or library music. But an earlier career scoring German b-movies, and the IMDB-provided knowledge that he born in Switzerland in 1904 and died there in 1997, would tend to suggest he was in fact a real composer, so, uh, good on him I suppose. It’s not often you get to hear a porno soundtrack written by an 80 year old survivor of two world wars.

FRANCO FILES: Barbed Wire Dolls (1975)

AKA:

‘Frauengefängnis’, ‘Jailhouse Wardress’, ‘Caged Women’, ‘El Reformatorio De Las Perdidas’, ‘Women's Penitentiary IV’.

Context:

Being a fan of a director like Jess Franco is all about learning to take the rough with the smooth, and at some point in this series we’ve got to acknowledge the fact that he made a whole pile of Women In Prison films over the course of his career, ranging from 1969’s surprisingly upmarket ‘99 Women’ to 1981’s unspeakably grimy ‘Sadomania’.

I know that the WIP genre has its fans, but, as you may have gathered from the tone of the preceding paragraph, I’m not really one of them. Probably best not dwell too much on my reasoning here, but let’s just say that more-so than their obvious legacy of cruelty and misogyny, I just find these films unspeakably dull – drab, joyless productions that offer few possibilities for visual or narrative excitement, like the slimy basement lurking beneath the grand ballrooms where all the more glamorous exploitation sub-genres go to party.

Obviously there are some noteworthy exceptions (Shunya Ito’s endlessly incredible ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ trilogy springs to mind), but by and large, I find these cheaply rendered tales of confinement and degradation to be a stone drag. So the $100,000 question is: can Jess Franco bring anything to the WIP party to make us sit up and take notice?

By way of an answer, let us turn to one of the earliest fruits of Franco’s long association with ubiquitous Swiss sleaze-baron Erwin C. Deitrich, and the third highest grossing film in Germany in 1975 according to Tombs & Tohill in ‘Immoral Tales’, ‘Frauengefängnis’ aka ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’.

Content:

Communal shower scenes are inexplicably absent, and there’s not a cat-fight to be seen, but aside from that this is WIP 101 really: beautiful Lina, sentenced to a lifetime behind bars for defending herself from a paternal rape attempt, finds herself condemned to a totally context-less island penitentiary ruled over by sadistic lesbian wardess Monica Swinn. Sharing a cell with a duo of underwear-shunning, mentally-damaged nymphomaniacs (Beni Cardoso and Peggy Markhoff), our heroine proceeds to run the inevitable gamut of electro-shock torment, rape, starvation, aphrodisiac injections, cowardly, lecherous doctors (euro-horror stalwart Paul Muller) and more rape, before an ill-conceived escape attempt leads to a desperate jungle pursuit, climaxing in… well you don’t think I’m going to spoil the ending of a grand drama like this, do you?

Kink:

Given that the many of the scenes in this film present the director with a visual palette of bare concrete walls, unmade beds and largely unclothed women, no prizes will be awarded for guessing where Jess’s zoom lens tends to linger. Although things remain softcore, restraint was entirely off the menu by the time Franco was working with Dietrich, meaning that viewers will be able to draw the leading ladies’ private parts from memory by the time they get to the end of this one.

Initially, most of the naked writhing is handled by Markhoff, but inevitably Lina soon gets in on the act too (I mean she’s got a reputation for this sorta thing to keep up, and hell with the fact her character’s supposed to be a naive innocent), and sitting through the film’s more dreary passages becomes easier with the knowledge that we’ll soon once more be able to enjoy the strangely soothing feeling of being smothered to death by ‘70s pussy. The assorted inter-personal sex scenes by contrast are somewhat less soothing, showcasing a teeth-grinding awkwardness more in keeping with the WIP genre as a whole, and personally I was never quite won over by the nazi-kitsch antics of Commandant Swinn and her decidedly improper hot-pants, but each to their own. 3/5

Creepitude:

With its sunny surroundings, sexy machine gun toting guards and improbable softcore seductions around every corner, I don’t think anyone will be surprised to learn that Jess Franco’s idea of a fascistic high security prison is less a relentless hell on earth and more like some strange holiday camp for habitual masochists.

In fact, the total unreality of the film’s world immediately undercuts any attempt to convincingly convey the brutality and horror of prison life, and if the obligatory scenes of squalid, high level nastiness (Lina wetting herself as electric shocks are administered on an iron bedspread, a naked Cardoso being starved and forced to beg for food) are indeed extremely distasteful, the disgust the viewer feels is less a gut reaction to the events depicted on-screen, and more a kind of soul-sapping, second-hand revulsion at the idea that we have somehow chosen to watch these listless, poorly staged atrocities in the name of entertainment. Grim.

It should probably be noted that the UK 18 rated version of the film I’m watching runs to 77 minutes of what IMDB claims is a potential 93, but given the strength and duration of what’s been left in, I can’t honestly imagine much of the missing footage was cut for reasons of explicitness (unless there’s a hardcore version out there somewhere, in which case god help us all). 1/5

Pulp Thrills:

I suppose if you were to consider the ‘70s WIP film as a valid pulp aesthetic in its own right, ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ would be an absolute hoot, ticking pretty much all of the relevant boxes for full scale camp enjoyment. As outlined above though, that’s not really my preferred bowl of gruel, and I found precious little escapist fun here, in spite of the complete detachment from reality. 1/5

Altered States:

Well quite a lot of the film is out of focus, so there’s that.

A brief rape scene in the prison governor’s office has some strikingly good disorientating, baroque compositions, but this stands out as an exception, and on the whole the technique here is unashamedly slap-dash, with erratic focus errors, wobbly, improvised zooming and awkwardly cropped framing all suggestive of a film whose makers spent more time looking at the clock than the viewfinder.

In the extras included on this Anchor Bay DVD, the supremely weasel-like Mr Dietrich expresses his belief that the film’s technical shortcomings were not merely the result of laziness and directorial apathy, but a deliberate statement of cinematic primitivism that directly prefigured the innovations of the Dogme 95 movement. And, indulgent though I am toward Jess Franco’s erratic artistic whims, even I feel I must pause here to suggest that this mind-bogglingly self-important claim is, how you say? A load of bollocks.

Probably the weirdest moment in ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ is a creepy, vaseline-fogged incest flashback in which Franco makes an appearance as Lina’s father, both parties seemingly carrying out their movements at half speed in a baffling and rather laughable attempt to mimic the effect of slow motion. Well, you win some and you lose some I suppose – at least they were *trying* for something a bit different. 2/5

Sight-seeing:

Filmed entirely in Honduras, ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ fits in nicely with the whole swathe of jungle-set films Franco made through the Dietrich era and into the early ‘80s (‘Doriana Gray’, ‘Sexy Sisters’, ‘Voodoo Passion’, ‘Diamonds of Kilimanjaro’, to name but a few), all of which feel like they could have been shot next door to each other, despite utilising a wide variety of ‘exotic’ (and no doubt affordable) locales.

Anyway, we get some jungle, a fairly impressive coastal fort, a few colonial looking houses. It’s ok I suppose, but not really much more eye-opening than the kind of terrain you’d see in one of those Filipino Vietnam movies. 2/5

Conclusion:

Y’know, in truth, ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ isn’t really that bad. It isn’t that good either… in fact, who am I kidding, by any reasonable standard it’s bloody awful. But if nothing else, the performances given by Lina Romay and Beni Cardosso feel genuine, managing to connect on a vague, emotional level that helps us empathise with their characters’ hopeless plight to an extent that is rarely encountered in the ultra-cynical realm of the WIP film.

And maybe I’m just saying this because I’m a fan, but despite its numerous crimes against social and cinematic decency, ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ doesn't leave one with the impression that Jess Franco is a bad man or a misogynist – more just a down-at-heel technician going through the contractually obligated motions, throwing in some personal touches as and when he can; a feeling that would sadly predominate through the majority of his subsequent collaborations with the Dietrich empire.