** Franco WIP again, though probably the softest of his excursion into caged women territory, Barbed Wire Dolls & Ilsa: Absolute Power especially being far crueler in their low budget visions of iron bar hotels for femmes. Still it's amazingly sleazy even for exploitation hell, where women spend ALL their time undressed & in a constant state of humiliation, a sheen of sweat adorning their nubile bodies, in a fast dash through the jungle or chained like dogs to a wall. It's strangely asexual but that pervy kink is always present, like the feeling you used to get sneaking downstairs to catch a late night baby blue while your parents were sleeping soundly. Naked women, power dynamics, sadism? No surprise this sub-genre found a kindred spirit in the likes of our director, zooming in on hairy crotches & pained-racked faces every chance he gets. Pulp adventure magazines filtered through the anything- goes 70's: that's Franco & it's genuinely unnerving because you can almost feel him getting off in staging these sick fantasies of submission & control. There's no budget to provide a slick sheen of commercialism, no blunt to the impact & its not like he's ever been very aesthetically formal either (to say the least).Its that jazz-riff quality that makes him invigorating & exotic for all his movies' awfulness, but also pervy-uncle creepy too; you don't have to look further than the bag-over-the-head bit from Ilsa to see what I mean, or the strapped-to-the-electrified bed, pi$$-in-the-chamber-pot from Barbed Wire Dolls. These are some dank psycho-sexual depths right here.

Again it's all lovably rinky-dink, paint blots for bullet wounds, sound effects for gunshots, Howard Vernon for depth. Its power derives from extremity, stark female objectification you don't see much outside of XXX. The women are denied even the dignity of clothing while at the whim of their evil keepers & its that kind of porno rationale that makes you envision Franco pissing himself happy staging these adolescent jerk-off skits, leaning over to fondle dear Linay while operating the camera. There's a weird kind of dedication here you won't see in the average impersonal WIP, something that lends a certain weight when usually these flicks are forgotten the moment you see them.

Otherwise the three or four women were all lovely to watch (Karine Gambier is so ethereal albino white she glows) & provided more of a presence than the usual non-Romay joint musters, adorable Susan Hemingway especially. I cared a bit more about what happened to this one dimensional lot & so the ending was very depressing but par for course.