Eric Louzil, the president of Mesa Productions in Los Angeles, learned of Ely's "Rent A Town" concept on an evening news show and began negotiations in 1984 to use the city as a filming location for what was then known as Georgia County Lock-up.

[8][9] The film's musical score was composed by John Massari, and the soundtrack includes two songs by Grim Reaper:[1] "Lust for Freedom" and "Rock You to Hell".

"[8] Caryn James of The New York Times wrote, "The worst kind of exploitation film masquerades as a spoof, luring innocent but otherwise intelligent people to the theater."

Shot with the elan of a TV soap opera on a bad day and packed with performances for which 'staggeringly inept' might be a mild compliment, this appalling little Troma Team release offers murder, mayhem, kidnapping, drugs, false arrest, perversion, rape, pornography, white slavery, arson, carnage—and, as if all that weren't enough, a rigged wrestling match."

"[1] Lou Lumenick of The Record wrote, "While this may not actually be the case, 'Lust for Freedom' looks as if its creators started out making a hard-core porno film and switched midway to a soft-core, women's prison picture.

If there were any criteria for casting most of the women other than their willingness to take off their clothes, it isn't apparent in the final product, which is unprofessional even by the standards of the Troma Team, whose last effort was 'Surf Nazis Must Die.'

When the women prisoners aren't parading in halter, shorts, and heavy makeup, they are as consistently overexposed in the endless shower and lesbian scenes as the movie's photography is underexposed."

Lumenick wrote that although Coll does not appear nude in any scenes, "the moronic script abundantly makes up for that with other humiliations such as encounters with crazed lady wrestlers and psychotic Indians.

Curry stated that like many Troma films, Lust for Freedom "is steeped in amateurish acting, erratic pacing and, just to keep the action moving along, massive plot holes.

"[14] The following year, Bill Gibron of PopMatters wrote, "You only need three words to understand why Lust for Freedom is such a fantastic freak-out of a film: three simple pieces of the English language that say so very much while remaining so basic and pure.

Gibron noted the poor acting, but wrote that the film "is so ripe with seedy shenanigans and despicable ideas that makers of autopsy porn look down on its delicious tawdriness.