“Never before have carnal lust, sex and sin been so clearly depicted,” begins a promotional clip for Amazon Jail, one of two slices of ’80s sexploitation from filmmaker Oswaldo De Oliveira new to DVD. Really, never
before? Well, that might be a stretch. Still, these well-produced
titles succeed rather unerringly within the caged confines of their
genre and intent.

Starring Maria Stella Splendore, Nadia Destro and Marta Anderson, 1980’s Bare Behind Bars
is set in an all-women’s penitentiary where group showers, full-on
beatings, water hosings and, yes, body cavity searches at the hands of
a creepy nurse are all part of the normal everyday existence. To stay
out of the torture chamber, inmates can choose to barter their bodies
to the wicked (female) warden, submit to said nurse or rage emptily
against the machine. Fed up with their lot, the inmates eventually rise
up and decide to wreak vengeance on their jailers. Bare Behind Bars
lacks in the detail of its characterizations (no surprise, really), but
its full-throb conviction goes a long way, both in terms of the
performances and De Oliveira’s manic staging of its many love scenes,
which highlight the charged dash for release of any kind in such a
shuttered environment.

Set deep in the Amazon jungle (natch), 1982’s Amazon Jail
similarly tracks a group of imprisoned nubile naïfs who writhe about a
lot, suffer the abuses of subjugators who aren’t above sampling the
merchandise themselves (a swarthy Sergio Hingst and his whip-cracking
female second-in-command, Joao Paulo Ramalho) and eventually turn the
tables on their white slave owners. This is probably the more wildly
plotted of the two films, including an illicit love plot and protracted
escape sequence in which some of these desperate women go from out of
the fire and into the frying pan so to speak, escaping brutal bounty
hunters only to get scooped up by a perverted priest that you just know
Marlon Brando would have had a hoot playing. The energetic make-out
sessions and seriocomic writhing of its first third — despite the grim
tawdriness of its set-up — gives way to legitimate unease in this final
act of flight and fight, with De Oliveira using quick cuts to build the
movie’s rhythm to an impassioned pitch. Amazon Jail won’t be
mistaken for great art, but it does rather artfully blend sex and
violence, indulging a base human preoccupation with both subjects.

Both discs are housed in regular clear Amray cases with thin
cardboard slipcovers with raised lettering, and presented in 1.66:1
widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions. The audio mixes are English
language Dolby digital mono tracks, and extremely poorly dubbed at
that, but capture the aural demands of the pictures quite fine. And
speaking of those pictures, the image for both movies is superb,
consistent in color and free from scratches and other debris. The only
extras on each disc, unfortunately, are each film’s own declamatory
trailer (“This is the story of women trapped into white slavery,
revealing their innermost desires in their fight to escape the terrors
of the Amazon,” intones Amazon Jail), which are a bit amusing in their meticulousness. I mean, if you have movies titled Bare Behind Bars and Amazon Jail,
you don’t exactly have to spend money on overwritten narration, right?
De Oliveira did, though, and that’s one of the things that made him
different. B- (Movies) C+ (Discs)