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.
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.
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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.