BARE BEHIND BARS. (1980) DIRECTED AND WRITTEN B Y OSWALDO DE OLIVEIRA. STARRING MARIA STELLA SPLENDORE, MARTA ANDERSON, DANIELLE FERRITE AND NEIDE RIBERO.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
‘In a South American prison, life is cheap but sex is cheaper…’
Not to be confused with the animal exploitation film, BEAR BEHIND BARS (relax, there’s no such thing; I made it up!), this is a sexploitation flick of the ‘women in prison’ genre. It was banned by the British Board of Film Classification in 1994, though that’s since been reversed, I do believe.
There’s no excuse for anyone to be watching this film, really, except that it’s chock-a-block with female nudity, lesbianism and simulated sex, both heterosexual and same-sex. No gay men though, only heaps and heaps of lesbians!
The scenes of nudity and sex are threaded together loosely by a thin plot involving a sadistic female prison warden, a prostitution ring and an escape attempt, but don’t worry! I promise you that nothing as tiresome as a plot will get in the way of the bouncing tits and jiggling asses you’ve come prepared to see.
The film is set in a women’s prison in Brazil. Conditions are disgusting and insanitary and the food is slop. The staff are all-female, all good-looking and their blouses are always falling open to reveal braless bosoms. They carry whips, which they’re not shy of using, and they like to watch the inmates showering, doing nude keep-fit in the dreaded exercise yard and getting off with each other.
The inmates are all young and beautiful with perfect, sun-tanned bodies. Nearly all of them sport the white bits round the hips and over the boobs that imply lots of bikini-clad sunbathing. They wear thin shirt-dresses and are forbidden to wear underwear because it makes it easier for them to hide contraband like weapons and drugs. Yes, easier, lol.
They all have thick dark bushes of pubic hair because women still had pubes back then. They weren’t ashamed of them because everyone had them. It’s only the modern era that has taught women that hair anywhere but on your head is a bad thing and must be immediately decimated.
There’s absolutely no privacy for toileting or bathing in the prison; everyone has to muck in together and, if you saw the state of the place, you’d agree with me that ‘muck’ was really the operative word.
The ice-blonde, alcoholic aristocratic female head warden, Sylvia, likes to get down and dirty with the new inmates. She also likes whipping them and inventing sadistic tortures for them, and she sells some of the choicest plums in the prison- by which I mean the girls- to rich millionaires as sex slaves with no future. Inmates are often ‘accidentally’ whipped to death and must be buried, with all records, in the already overcrowded prison cemetery…
The prison nurse, Barbara, is a Marilyn Monroe lookalike and soundalike. ‘I simply adore raspberry pudding,’ she says in a breathy, baby-voice while gorging from what we’re supposed to think looks like a carton of spunk, for crying out loud!
She hasn’t a clue how to take someone’s blood pressure but she knows how to check a pussy or a crack for a knife, a razor-blade or a bag of weed, and also how to take sexual advantage of a nubile young newbie who’s far from home and crying out for a bit of comfort.
There’s male-female sex in the film too, in the form of an hilarious encounter between a prison officer and a dark, hairy, heavily-moustached local man who comes to the prison to deliver a consignment of brooms, of all things.
He grabs the prison officer’s breasts from behind while she’s ticking off figures on a list, and the next thing you know, she’s having wild, uninhibited nudie sex on the prison store-room floor with her exceptionally hirsute, sad-faced middle-aged Romeo.
Together they enact pretty much every position from the Kama Sutra, including the very hairy one known as sixty-nine. When her lugubrious Lothario eventually takes his leave, he wishes the prison officer he’s just royally shafted ‘a Merry Christmas to you,’ and she does the same. Funny isn’t the word…!
There are a lot of scenes showing derelict and dilapidated shanty towns and the most abject Brazilian poverty in the bits where some prisoners manage to escape and see a bit of the countryside around the prison, but I’m not convinced that any real attempt at social commentary is intended here.
I forgot to mention that here, the ‘screws’ or prison guards have sex with the inmates too. There’s one mad scene where a gasping, half-naked ‘screw’ is standing splay-legged and orgasmic outside a locked cell while hands come out of the cell’s food hatch to manhandle her pussy and breasts.
Still, it’s not as mad as the scene where someone’s carved a perfectly acceptable, if oversized, knob, to use as a dildo, out of an actual pineapple! Still, it makes a change from the whole prison having to share the only other dildo all the time, taking turns and then passing it from cell to cell on a string…
They’re all mad in this prison, if you ask me, sex-mad, and, if you’re planning to watch this silly, filthy movie, then you’d damn well better be sex-mad too, that’s all I’m saying…!
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.
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