Femmes en cages

Deep in the Brazilian jungle, a super-sleazy guy complete with an odd voice, long greasy hair and giant mustache runs a successful women's prison where random American girls are kept in wooden cages and sold to filthy rich bastards as sex-toys. Some of the girls manage to escape by setting the prison ranch on fire but subsequently they run straight into the wide open arms of a troop of hunters and next an illegal organization of gold-diggers. Will these poor girls EVER get out of the jungle? "Amazon Jail" is a thoroughly bizarre and lousy exploitation film. There are really a lot of things happening, but it's all very boring and edited together without the slightest bit of continuity or logic. Freshly introduced characters disappear again without further explanation, pure & innocent girls turn into cold-hearted bitches overnight and there even is a gay priest who becomes a vicious rapist. Huh? There's only a bit of violence and it's really tame. Nudity and sleaze, on the other hand, there is plenty! All the girls run through the jungle topless and they regularly turn to each other for some lesbian comfort. They are so close that they wash each other's vagina... How about that? "Amazon Jail" looks like it was made by slave laborers, as the camera-work is clumsy and the lighting is very poor. I never heard about director Oswaldo De Oliviera before, but he seemed to be one of Brazil's busiest exploiter, with no less than 20 films revolving on violence against women. One to avoid at all costs...

Oswaldo de Oliveira made this film a couple of years after he made his awful Bare Behind Bars. One would think that he would have learned from his mistakes and he did, but unfortunately, not much. There is the obligatory nudity at various junctures and the rampant lesbianism that seems to take over any hot young girl who gets locked up with any other hot young girl, or who just happen to splash about in a jungle stream.

There is a plot of sorts to this film. The girls actually manage to escape but these girls just cannot strike it lucky, running foul of more human traffickers and an illegal mining operation. The one good guy gets some men to launch a rescue mission but they seem as useless as everyone else's acting ability.

It takes more than a lot of nudity to make a good film although some may say that lots of nudity makes a good film. Some scenes were overly long, especially the dancing scene that ended up as an orgy scene that also went on too long. If you want sleaze and do not mind the failures in all the other departments of film making, then give it a go.

NOTE: This review was written and published (in print!) in 1990, pre-IMDb, and when this movie had floating around video stores on VHS tape for several years.

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As a double bill, Oswaldo de Oliveira's AMAZON JAIL and Jess Franco's HELLHOLE WOMEN can't be beat. They're practically identical.

In AMAZON JAIL, some nubile (and, for the most part, suspiciously not lesbian) slave-chicks have been abducted from gawd-knows-where by an evil slaver who looks a lot like David Crosby on a pure Crisco diet. He in turn sells them to the highest bidder during orgies he holds in his Italian-deco living room. Here, more slobbering fat guys shove their faces into the continually shimmying asses of the limboing lovelies.

Of course, where there's women being dominated, there's always a subset who're just itchin' for liberation. So would you after several days of sex through bamboo cage bars. The broad squad heads out into the jungle, where they survive by sweating, arguing, and revealing their breasts to nature.

AMAZON JAIL is so cheap it makes the similarly rated HELLHOLE WOMEN (and most Jess Franco sleaze for that matter) look like a masterpiece of eroticism. Plenty of zooms and out-of-focus shots means you can tell your parents (who're bound to catch you watching this crap) that this piece-o-crap is art! The english dubbing (done in Berlin) seems to frequently disagree with the action on screen. As with HELLHOLE WOMEN, AMAZON JAIL often feels like it might have originated as hardcore piece of Brazilian adventure-sleaze edited down to softcore Brazilian adventure-sleaze, but alas we may never know.

Plenty of skin and lots of gruelling babes-in-the-woods material do not a B-movie make, though. If this wasn't so damned derivative and predictable, it might be a good rental. HELLHOLE WOMEN tries much more valiantly to achieve trashdom and largely succeeds. Since these flicks should be judged equally by their shock values - gratuitous tits, lesbians and chicks-in-chains - AMAZON JAIL just doesn't cut it.

Lured by bogus employment proposals women are kidnapped and forced into sex slavery for wealthy businessmen who fly deep into the Amazon jungle to satisfy their lust. The mastermind of this operation is a man by the name of "Edgar" (Sergio Hingst) and along with his wife "Helena" (Elizabeth Hartman) they represent the dregs of humanity and seem only interested in fulfilling their carnal desires. Yet while their debauchery continues night and day the leader of the imprisoned women, "Betty" (Sandra Graffi), has come up with a daring plan to escape. At any rate, so much for the general plot which might have amounted to something if the director (Osvaldo de Oliveira) had made even a half-hearted attempt to create something bordering on average. Instead, all this movie offers has to offer is nudity, sex and more nudity. Now, considering that some of the women--most notably Elys Cardoso (as "Liz"), Shirley Benny ("Mary") and the aforementioned Sandra Graffi--weren't at all bad-looking, this film certainly had possibilities. But the acting and the script were extremely basic, and it lacked the necessary character development and direction required for even a mediocre film. In essence, the entire movie seemed created simply to set up one sexual scenario after another with no concern at all for a quality picture. That said, while I appreciate the efforts of the young ladies who graced the screen, I still must rate this movie as below average.

Evil businessman Edgar (who's pretty ridiculous looking with his thick mustache) runs a human trafficking joint from his home somewhere deep in the amazon jungle. His wife Helena is part of the business, it's her job to keep the women - harmless tourists who were offered lucrative jobs and got kidnapped instead - in check.

Unsurprisingly, a few of the women plan an escape. So far, so good. Not the worst idea for a "women in prison" flick. But what follows is party scene after party scene, and "but you promised us you would help us escape" - "I do, just wait a little longer" exchanges between one of the women and the nephew of Edgar (that's right, he doesn't even get a name).

The whole storyline is just a sorry excuse to show as many topless or fully nude women on screen as possible. Now, I'm not prude, and have nothing against nudity in films. But here it's the only quality the film has to offer. Sad news for everyone who was hoping for some naked men as well: Only a few very hairy chests can be seen.

At least the casting was done well enough, and the women really do look very attractive. But on the other hand, the internet is full of very attractive and very nude women, so there's absolutely no reason to waste your time on this movie.