Seen for the first time in December 2012.
There are many different types of Jess Franco movies and equally many different ways to enjoy them, but these are not on display in "Devil's Island Lovers." Or at least the version that I just watched, which was not dubbed but subtitled in Spanish and possibly a clean version. This is basically a straight women-in-prison film, but completely without exploitation. So this is Jess Franco making a relatively mainstream movie in the '70s. Literally anyone else could have made this movie. What we want out of a Franco film is something that only Jess Franco could have made, in one of the many ways that that is possible.
There is no avant garde here. No surrealism. No proto-Lynchian nonsense. No amusing, halfhearted incompetence. No exploitation. No sensuality. Nothing strange about this at all. Just a boring drama in a corrupt place, with guilt but no justice. Maybe it could have been a good noir in different hands. Grade D.
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