If you ever wondered what would happen if a sex-obsessed auteur got his hands on a prison, a camera, and absolutely no supervision, look no further than Barbed Wire Dolls — Jess Franco’s 1976 contribution to the Women-In-Prison genre, or as it should be more accurately labeled: Wasted Time Among the Brain-Dead. This is Franco at his most Franco: naked, nonsensical, and narratively lobotomized.
The film opens — as so many Franco disasters do — with a woman stabbing her father to death for reasons that are never explained, justified, or even interesting. Cue an abrupt trial where the judge appears to be reading his lines off a napkin, and she’s carted off to a maximum-security women’s prison that appears to be located inside a condemned shed. This isn’t so much a prison as it is a poorly lit basement with bars nailed to the windows and a jazz soundtrack that sounds like a keyboard trying to summon Satan.
Once inside, the plot goes limp faster than the male extras. The prison is run by a sadistic, oversexed warden named The Wardress (because Franco was too lazy to give her a real name), played by Franco’s wife Lina Romay, who struts around in leather boots and various states of undress while barking orders like a dominatrix with a head injury. Her idea of punishment? Having the prisoners oil each other up while Franco’s camera zooms in on their knees.
The “Barbed Wire Dolls” of the title are the inmates, though nobody gets near a doll or barbed wire. Instead, they get long monologues about their tragic pasts, followed by immediate toplessness. We’ve got the nymphomaniac, the suicidal poet, the psychotic religious girl, and the new fish — all of whom exist solely to wriggle, moan, and occasionally slap each other in what Franco calls a “fight scene” and what sane people call “two people rolling around slowly like wet laundry in a dryer.”
It’s not just exploitative — it’s lazy. Everything that could be titillating is drowned in Franco’s favorite stew of cigarette smoke, zoom-ins, and complete disregard for blocking. The sex scenes — and there are many — have all the energy of a root canal filmed through a cheesecloth. Franco lingers on body parts like he’s trying to find the meaning of life between two shoulder blades. He films crotches like he’s in love with the concept of pubic hair. And just when you think the film couldn’t get more uncomfortable, someone starts talking about incest or licking a doorknob seductively.
Dialogue? Mostly absent. And when it does arrive, it hits like a wet sock:
“There is no justice. Only desire.”
“God will forgive my body, but not my dreams.”
“I hate this prison… it smells like secrets.”
You’ll be tempted to believe these lines are metaphors. They aren’t. Franco just thinks cryptic whispers make up for a missing script. They don’t. They make you want to throw your TV into the nearest volcano.
And the editing? It’s less “edited” and more “hastily spliced together during a blackout.” Scenes begin mid-sentence. Conversations trail off into silence. Characters vanish for long stretches, only to return and announce plot developments that happened offscreen, probably in another movie. There’s a subplot involving a male guard who may or may not be a rapist, revolutionary, or stand-in for Franco himself. He delivers his lines with all the passion of someone giving a TED Talk on expired yogurt.
Of course, no Franco film would be complete without zooms. Barbed Wire Dolls features what may be a world record for unnecessary close-ups of armpits, ankles, and confused expressions. Franco seems allergic to steady shots. He’ll zoom in on a woman’s eye, then her shoulder, then back to her eye, then down to her toe, as if trying to operate the camera via Ouija board.
The prison itself is hilariously unconvincing. There are no guards. No schedules. No structure. Just a lot of damp stone walls, stained mattresses, and women wandering around in high heels. There are solitary confinement scenes that take place in a broom closet. Franco tries to pass off a wooden chair as a torture device. And the infamous “barbed wire” appears exactly once — wrapped around a fence that nobody acknowledges and that looks like it was bought at a garden center.
Then there’s the climax. Oh, God, the climax. A half-baked prison riot where people yell, flash boobs, and fall down in slow motion while a saxophone solo melts in the background. Guns appear out of nowhere. Someone gets strangled with a belt. The warden dies in a way that’s meant to be symbolic but mostly feels like mercy. And the main character walks away into the sun, as if she’s accomplished something beyond surviving this cinematic colonoscopy.
The final shot? Franco’s camera lingering on a woman’s thighs for a full minute as the credits roll. It’s the perfect metaphor for this film: bloated, directionless, and utterly obsessed with flesh to the exclusion of logic, pacing, or human emotion.
Final Verdict: 1 out of 5 oiled-up metaphors in a broom closet
Barbed Wire Dolls is everything wrong with Eurotrash exploitation cinema rolled up in a musty jumpsuit. It’s sexist, slow, and shot like Franco was drunk on baby oil and ennui. Watch it only if you’re a diehard Franco completionist, or if you’re being held at gunpoint by someone who really, really hates you.
Avoid unless your fetish is tedium. Or you like your prison dramas with no drama, no tension, and about as much realism as a middle school Halloween haunted house.
