Curral de Mulheres

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...

Com'n people, seriously less than 4 out of 10? It's pornographic and some actors/actresses were amateurs when the movie was filmed. The movie is of pornographic nature so most scenes are there to satisfy sexual desires. Therefore you won't see things that you would expect from other non pornographic movies. For a pornographic movie like this, they did a good job already: full frontal nudity, slaves, submission, erotic dancing and so on. Anything you would see in a porn will be in this movie. Don't be so picky, you don't need to watch it if you think it will be a bad movie. Looking forward to watching the next one.

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.

Young women are kidnapped in the amazon by Brazilian satanists, whose goal is to sell them to the highest foreign bidder. Some of the girls manage to escape but are pursued by their captors. In order to gain their freedom, the girls must outwit their captors. Bringing the film to a sleazy climax. Lots of nudity, lesbianism, and chessy dance numbers, the usual stuff you see in a good WIP film. Thats 'Women in Prison' for all you cinema illiterates.

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.