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| From http://wrongsideoftheart.com/wp-content/gallery/posters-b/bare_behind_bars_poster_01.jpg |
Dir. Oswaldo de Oliveira
With this I'm starting a project
that this blog will be incredibly useful in pushing along - clearing out my
To-Watch pile. It's not a significant problem, avoiding an obvious pun
considering the first film I'm covering, but I want to clear and rewatch
through films I've had for up to five years now. It's going to last up to next
year, and while I won't review all of them, and there will likely be some bad
films I have to go through, there will be at least some peculiar choices within
this project. Like Bare Behind Bars.
Note the version I viewed was technically censored. For me a single second can
have a drastic change on a final film, but I can still fully review this
Brazilian women-in-prison film once banned in Britain because, while 1 minute
and 35 seconds have been removed by request of the BBFC here, I don't think it
drastically changes the film. If an uncut version was available would I watch
that one and get a new review from it? Maybe, but this one is fine as it is. |
| From http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly5v2gvflA1qziwcjo1_1280.jpg |
This is certainly one of
scuzziest films I've reviewed on this blog, barring of course Alien From The Darkness (1996) for Videotape Swapshop, the difficulty in
finding screenshots that have no nudity in them a little harder here because it's
a key point of the film and rampant
in this content for eighty percent of its sum total. I've avoided nudity and
sex in a lot of my screenshot choices over the year or so of adding them to my
blog reviews, out of a desire of not coming off as another male film fan whose
just obsessed with bared breasts and nudity, thus alienating any potential
female readers, but this review is going to have a bit of perversion this time.
There was an explicit tag before you enter this site for this reason.
There's actually not a lot of
plot here in the film. A group of convicts in an all female prison slowly plan
to escape. Aside from this, the film is bordering on aimless porn but only
reaches softcore which just skips to the sex instead of much actual plot. In a
rat infested, oppressive prison of torture and neglect everyone has given up
and, barring that group who want to escape, decided to shag her nearest
neighbours, even prison guard, no stop. The head warden sleeps with her
prisoners or sends them off to be playthings for older women, the guards are
sleeping with everyone, the bubble headed nurse is in a relationship with one
prisoner full of bizarre habits, and the prisoners themselves are literally
passing dildos on the same fishing line, from one cell to the other, they trade
secret messages on. It truly feels like porn, the removed footage for the
British television screening (?!) actually pornographic content, and emphasises
this tone by crash cuts to any random sexual acts it could imagine taking
place, from 69ing to a phallic cut pineapple being licked. Instantly the area
of the male subconscious called "guilt" is reached and asks
"should I be watching this?", only for the answer to be a lot more
complicated when thought about carefully. The film itself is trashy, with no
regard for eroticism, emotion, romance or relationships, just wall-to-wall
nudity and titillation. Like the nurse character, high on her own ether stocks
and completely weird even if she wasn't on it continually, this film is
off-its-gourd in tone. Bafflement is a more likely response to it than actual
offense.
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| From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VEACBqMkU6w/TwO-5-nM7ZI/AAAAAAAADBY/Wi1PUrr9AOg/s1600/Bare-Behind-Bars-Girls-Conspiracy-6.jpg |
What do you react to in a film
like this? Honestly, to get offended by it, if you're not the target audience
who would find it a turn on or giggling at its brazen tone, is pointless. There
is worse in existence. There are obvious issues still with the content but even
an absolute greenhorn like myself in the area of sexuality has learnt how complex
this and gender politics actually are. Some will be understandably shocked by
the sexualised degradation, with some torture too, but it's no way near as
shocking now and barely scrapping the world of BDSM that, despite my little
knowledge of it, still has humiliation and dominance scenarios more extreme
than shown in here. And that's not taking into account completely fantastical
scenarios or sexual masochism like with the direction the late artist/performer
Bob Flanagan took it to. The
potential gender issues, of a film made by a man for men to drool over
stereotypes of lesbians, is more of an issue for me in the discrepancy of
material made by people of both genders and all sexualities. If there was a
market for it, and people were allowed the budgets and international distribution
these exploitation films had, there should have been women-in-prison erotica
made by lesbians for lesbians. There
should have been ones set in an all male prison with homoerotic longings and lusting
over the pained and battered male bodies. These films may actually exist, but
in cult circles its patriarchal, heterosexual films like Bared Behind Bars that get the coverage and DVD releases, which is
the discrepancy. This film is an example of a more significant issue to tackle
in society, not the problem itself.
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| From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_aStn38p4Q1o/TTa_DzBwJQI/ AAAAAAAAE30/w6gCUJzYdlU/s1600/cap.jpg |
The actual, eye rolling issue
with the film for me is, forgiving the actual pun of the review, the movie
eventually loses its balls. For three quarters of it length, there are no male
characters. One man appears and sleeps with a guard in the storage room, where
everyone seems to go to have more intimate relationships, but it's a passing
moment of fun between them with no connection to anyone else. The prison
setting is one of misery, but the porno tone actually makes it seem that
everyone is enjoying themselves way too
much, where even taking a shower together sets the prisoners (and their
watching guards) off, emphasised by the continuous amount of sex and nudity
throughout. The head warden gets to the point she's completely knackered by the
next morning from her relationship with one person each night before.
Accidentally, for the exploitation content, the film suggests women characters
completely disconnected from men and being perfectly content with their own
company. When the escape story takes place it goes over to even more subversive
areas at the beginning. Then a male or two panicked. The horrible moment in
these exploitation films where social norms must win and patriarchy must
dominate happens again. Suddenly female characters have to shack up with hairy
men, rearing out that damn chestnut that "really, all women desire the
love of a man", which is obnoxious, and honestly, feels like the threatened
ideology of males jealous of women and compensating for a lack of testicular
fortitude of their own. An all-male police force crack down on everyone, a male
prison governor gets involved, and while you may be sympathetic to the
anti-hero women, it feels like, in masculinity taking power from the female
"perverts", my own gender was taking a dump in my mind and embarrassing
itself again. This is the real piece of offence of Bared Behind Bars, not lots of very naked women grinding into each
other, or in one case, bringing out the strap-ons.
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| From http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film3/dvd_reviews53/bare_behind_bars_ /bare_behind_bars_arrow_dvd_cap07.jpg |
The film even before this
crumbles because it has no real plot or tone, just a series of sexual events. It's
usually funny when the nurse is onscreen because, along with her English
dubbing voice, everything she does is incredibly weird. But the film is dated. It's
surprising how far this film goes in content but it's not shocking anymore. It's
so full of sex every few minutes that it's not actually titillating, and being
mere softcore it cannot become masturbatory material either when viewers could
get actual porn online. It could have been sexually potent if there was actual
eroticism, but set in dull, oppressive grey prison sets, the camera shows too
much of the clearly artificial sets, and the content, upfront and with inmates
writhing each other willy nilly like the contents of a gummy worms sweet bag on
a vibrating chair, is comically trashy instead. There is something far more
transgressive about this film than many others, befitting a country of origin
that also gave birth to Coffin Joe,
but barring this its nothing shocking or memorable unless you like the car
crash of arbitrary nudity and that nurse's ridiculous behaviour. Compare it to Japan's
Female Prisoner Scorpion films and it's
a sitting target against those films and their technical craft and
unconventionality. Its junk and its unfortunately not very memorable junk
unless you include the moments where you ask "are those two women really
doing that in the storage room?". But this is not memorable in a
way beyond catching you off guard and being the moments you immediately conjure
up separately then remember the rest of the film fully. My desensitisation to
this kind of material influenced this opinion definitely, as I clear through films
like this on my to-watch pile, but once you get to that point, you realise what
is legitimately shocking and what's just tacky. There's a tacky thrill to the
film, but while I'll defend it from accusations of the content, I'm not that
fond of it that much by the end.
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| Your guess is as good as mine. (From http://atrocitynights.com/Watching/Images/bbb.jpg) |
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