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6
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5 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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A
sleazy, cheesy Brazilian booty-fest.
With Amazon Jail,
director/co-writer Oswaldo De Oliveira takes a far less transgressive
approach than he did with his semi-hardcore Bare
Behind Bars (1980).
There's no blowjob footage, no one gets his dick sliced off
and shoved down his throat. The shenanigans are significantly
tamer here. Ironically, since the brutalizers this time are
almost all men, the film comes off as being the more misogynistic
of the two. Of course, you really don't go into a flick like
this expecting a "positive" portrayal of women —
beyond the
not inconsiderable positives of their physical charms. De Oliveira
tends to balance things out in this one, though. The captive
girls may be rock stupid, but so is everybody in this
movie. Lots of bitch-slapping,
sure, but its mostly the prisoners smacking each other around
instead of their captors doing it. And
at least one of the major villains is female, because where
ever nubile, scantily-clad young ladies are held in bondage
(especially in South American hellholes), there's a middle-aged,
predatory lesbian there to take advantage of them. As it is
written in the Book of Franco.
These
gals don't get tortured, either, unless you count being forced
to dance topless in a thong while being drooled on and groped
by a bunch of fat, greasy old guys. (Okay, so they're tortured.)
The women are shapely young things lured to a remote jungle
location with the promise of good-paying jobs as tour guides.
Instead they're thrown into a rather flimsy-looking wooden corral
for purchase as sex slaves by buyers who fly in from time to
time to preview the merchandise. This white slavery operation
is run by a charming gent named Ogre — uh, I mean "Edgar".
(Well, the guy does look like a debauched ogre... or
perhaps a washed-up heavy metal musician, bloated with booze
and drugs, some twenty years after the last concert tour.) The
fortysomething Helena manages the 'inmates' for him when she
isn't submitting to his drunken advances or rubbing oil on the
ta-tas of a cute jailbait-ish prisoner. Edgar's young nephew
finds working for him disagreeable; the kid's fallen in love
with one of the girls and is chafing from having to feel her
up through the wooden bars. He pledges to help the girls escape
Edgar's compound. During a party thrown for prospective clients,
one of the prisoners flees into the jungle before the nephew's
plan can be put into action. She's hunted down and shot by Edgar's
goons, but while searching for her the trackers capture three
more lovelies who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong
time. (And are introduced skinny-dipping in a waterfall.) Being
local girls, the new acquisitions turn out to have boyfriends,
who eventually get together and launch a rather lackadaisical
search and rescue mission. Meanwhile, the gals in the corral
make their big break and escape into the jungle. Edgar and Helena
are dealt with, but unfortunately for the girls they've run
off into the most dangerous region of the rain forest. The perils
of nature and the depredations of man await our frightened fillies
in a Green Hell.
Now these girls aren't
exactly the sharpest tools in the shed... (They shriek like
banshees when startled by a flock of birds, then keep
screaming even after they realize what made them jump.) But
they can't be faulted for going from the frying pan to the fire
— the nephew told them to go that way! While they're being bumped
off one by one and eventually falling into the lecherous hands
of a strange cult of gold prospectors, the nephew joins up with
the three boyfriends in their search. A more lethargic, procrastinating
bunch of heroes I've yet to see. Of course, this only provides
further opportunities for our jungle cuties to get sweatier
and less clothed.
Amazon
Jail brings absolutely nothing new to the "Jungle
WIP", a sub- subgenre pretty much tapped of potential
scenarios in the 1970s by directors like Jess Franco (99
Women, Women
In Cellblock 9). It's also just plain bad. The script (at
least this English-dubbed version) is ludicrous, the acting
atrocious. And thank God for that. Hot naked women are really
great and all, but they can't carry an entire film (except perhaps
straight-up porn); fortunately, the dialog and situations in
Amazon Jail offer plenty of laughs
not intended by the filmmakers. When not ogling the lasses'
asses I was chuckling at the goofy dubbing, characters and performances.
(Just where the hell did they find this Uncle Edgar the Ogre
guy? He's utterly gonzo.) In my book, plenty of naked female
pulchritude + cheesy 'do-it-yourself MST3K' laughs =
a good time.
Some of the women
are quite attractive and are nude and/or seminude throughout
virtually the entire film. De Oliveira knows what the audience
for a naked-white-chicks-in-the-jungle movie wants to see and
gives it to 'em in spades. Expect much more rumpshake than milkshake,
however; while blessed with delectably curvaceous derrières,
these gals are all relatively small-breasted. (Not that there's
a dang thing at all wrong with that.) Solely based on this movie,
it would seem that Brazilian guys — or at least one of 'em named
Oswaldo — like their ladies petite and very tan... Their tender,
tawny bodies glistening like the tops of homemade oven-fresh
rolls, lovingly lacquered with a sheen of melted butter.
Makin' me hungry!
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For
a super-obscure low budget foreign trash pic almost a quarter-century
old, Blue Underground's spankin' new DVD edition looks outstandingly
pristine. The 16x9 enhanced, 1.66:1 transfer is excellent.
A solid mono audio track (dubbed English only) brings out all
the bitch-slaps and bongo beats with sufficient clarity; Edgar's
blustery asides occasionally sound muffled but I believe this
to be a symptom of the film's post-production sound recording.
The English-language theatrical trailer, featuring some humorously
salacious narration, is the only extra. 6/01/06 |
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