UK DVD Review: Bare Behind Bars

Bare Behind Bars (1980)
Distributor: Arrow
DVD Release Date: 31 January 2011
Director: Oswaldo de Oliveira
Starring: Maria Stella Splendore, Marta Anderson, Danielle Ferrite, Neide Ribeiro
Review by: Keri O’Shea

Like many ‘women in prison’ movies, Bare Behind Bars doesn’t seek to establish itself as a philosophical work. You can never accuse Oswaldo de Oliveira of failing to deliver on his title. Not only does the title screen – which also features the fantastically-lewd original artwork by Cinema Sewer maestro Robin Bougie – provide the viewer with clips of some of the most, ahem, notable scenes, but within a meagre five minutes of the start we’ve already met our boozy warden, our baton-wielding guards and a horde of hot prisoners; we’ve also witnessed a stabbing, a brawl, a subsequent hosing-down and a spot of nude water torture. Bergman it ain’t, and nor would we want it to be.

This is a romp, through and through; therefore a coherent, innovative plot is absolutely secondary to cramming as many acres of nude female flesh into the proceedings as possible. However, as far as it goes, Bare Behind Bars charts the clampdown on a South American women’s jail after an inmate is stabbed in the back with a razor during exercise. The (hot, lesbian) guards’ investigation seems to chiefly consist of stripping everyone, or sending them to the (hot, lesbian) nurse for an internal examination, or sending them to the (hot, lesbian) warden’s office for questioning, or a combination of these. We are also introduced to the fact that the prison has a lucrative sideline in selling the most nubile girls to an outside agency. This happens to one girl, Betty, who is sent off to live with a rich (hot, lesbian) patroness. Betty’s former peers have no such luck; conditions in the jail are going from bad to worse. When they can stand it no more, a small group of women begin to plot their escape…

This is all conducted in the most lurid manner imaginable. Don’t come to this film expecting any rumination on the subject of female criminality: the prison here is basically just a framing device, the institution is nameless, and most of the women remain nameless. It’s also worth saying that this film is very, very sleazy. The sex is unsimulated, folks, and the cuts which have been made for the film to get its 18 certificate remove only some of the most explicit frames. So, it’s not for the prudish, and it certainly doesn’t go for a political angle, but there is more to Bare Behind Bars than a montage of sex scenes. The film is delightfully self-aware, and that self-awareness is often expressed through its odd comic touches. For example, I laughed at the ingenious way the women had rigged up string which allowed them to pass a dildo between cells, and at the ether-addled nurse who tries to take her boss’s blood pressure by putting the cuff around her neck.

Oswaldo de Oliveira’s enthusiastic approach to en masse nudity and frantic lesbian action meant that his film has never before received a release in the UK, despite the best efforts of Redemption Films during the 1990s. Justifying their initial ban, the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) said of the film that, “its appeal rested primarily on the spectacle of naked women en masse, at the mercy of cruel authority, the meagre narrative moving through image after image of violation – by sex, by medical examination, by crude sex toys, by razor blades, by rats.” Having just seen the film for the first time, I’d of course agree that the film depends heavily on the salacious, but I cannot agree that Bare Behind Bars is as downright nasty as the BBFC thought back then. It’s more nude than nasty; there are some violent scenes, but there is a good deal less violence and aggression here than in many other women in prison films and a lot more campy humour, which the censor seemed to miss. This is an entertainingly sordid, zany piece of exploitation film, and Arrow Video has done a sterling job on their upcoming UK release.