Welcome to this week’s B-Movie Enema!

You know what? I’m kind of excited this week. Why? We’re going to look at some old favorites in terms of a distributor and subgenres. First up, we have a return from Vinegar Syndrome. What a heck of a boutique distributor of physical media. If you have a desire to see obscure horror and thrillers, sexploitation films, or general exploitation from other countries, there’s no one better.

I’ve got a ton of their releases. I’m not one of those types who gets everything from them, but I have a fair amount of their releases. Let’s be honest… They are a wonderful pipeline for content on this blog. So, when they put out some kooky releases in 2023, I had to jump on board with the entire intent to feature it here in February 2024.

In that release slate for 2023, there was a two-pack that we’re diving into this week and next. We start things off with Amazon Jail from Oswaldo de Oliveira. This was the final film of Brazillian director de Oliveira as he would die five years later at the age of 58 or 59. He worked as a cinematographer, writer, director, and occasionally appeared in some of his films. He comes from Brazil’s “Mouth of Garbage” movement. I feel like I should put quotation marks around or italicize the word movement here, but I trust Vinegar Syndrome’s tastes and film analysis. Apparently, we’re going to be in for a hell of a ride with this subgenre of Brazilian cinema as this is a movement that produced a whole lotta crazy genre films that included horror, action, sex comedies, and pornography.

I should point out that the pornography came much later after censorship in Brazilian cinema preventing sex films was abandoned. So, really this was a movement that kind of sprung out of Sao Paulo and was hitting out against bland and heavily censored content. As is the case with a lot of exploitation that is made, it’s low on budget, negligent on deep plot, and big on returns for people who invested in the films. I guess you could also say that it really exemplified the subversive nature of the exploitation craft too.

Even better reason for me to be excited? There’s not much more I can really say about de Oliveira or the genre as I’m basically flying by the seat of my pants here. That means I can get right into this movie and start getting to work. That’s exciting because I really want to see what this is all about because Vinegar Syndrome is usually right when they say things are gonna be nuts.

Instantly, our movie opens with South American music and a guy waiting to meet someone coming in on a private plane. Now, I don’t want to be that type of guy, but there is something about this beginning that kind of already gets my brain noodles cooking. There are four guys in total we see here at the onset of this movie. There’s the guy who drives a jeep to the small airstrip to meet three other guys coming in on the private plane. With the pilot, we have two passengers wearing hats. One guy is wearing a white suit. Like, think Panama Jack. The other guy is smoking a fat cigar. Think Texas oil guy. When they get into the jeep to take off, the guy who came with the jeep does not drive. It’s the pilot. I don’t know what it is about this that suddenly made my brain melt, but when you have someone driving a vehicle to meet other people and then that driver takes the passenger seat for the another guy? That’s up there with those little strange things a lot of movies do. Like, someone is offered a cup of coffee and they take somewhere between zero and one sip of the coffee and then say they have to go. Or someone pulls out a cigarette, lights it, takes two drags, and then snuffs it. Do they know how fucking much packs of smokes are these days?

Holy shit, I hope the next 90 minutes are not loaded with these little things or my brain is going to explode.

Our two be-hatted travelers are taken to a large home somewhere in what appears to be the light Amazon. I say light because the jeep went through a lot of paths in trees and stuff but it’s not really the Amazon you might think. There, they have a drink and do business with a guy with the most typical South American bushy mustache you could imagine. The two travelers bring a big ass suitcase of money. Edgar is the mustachioed man.

It seems as though Edgar is a drug supplier by the way they are talking and this being the mid-80s. However, that’s not what he is selling when he says he has “high-class” merchandise. He’s involved in sex trafficking. That’s when we see a wooden cage loaded with young women who have been kidnapped and held hostage. Because this is something of a women in prison flick, of course we have ourselves a lady enforcer of the rules. I guess she’s a warden but this isn’t a real jail so… I’ll just call her an enforcer.

Our stand-in for Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, in this movie is Helena played by Elizabeth Hartmann. She comes to visit the girls in the cage and says some of them will be shipped out in the morning. She says that as long as they do what they’re told, they will live a life of luxury. Maybe they will even like the man they are sold to and get lavished with jewels. One of the girls says she’d do anything for a jewel. Most of the girls are unhappy with their situation, but many of them will still be sold off in hopes of a better life. They were lured into the Amazon with the promise of work and pay, but then they got tossed into the cage and left there. She tells the girls they will get a chance to bathe and put on some perfume because they are going up to Edgar’s house for a party with the two guys who flew into town to pick up new merchandise.

This party is kind of hilarious. It’s just the two guys getting shit-faced while Edgar and Helena watch on as some of the girls from the cage are dancing wearing nothing but g-strings and leis. They dance around the drunk guys in a circle and giggle and laugh. Sometimes they smack their asses up against the guys’ faces or shove their muffs in their faces. Apparently, the girls pass muster.

Edgar is disappointed that Helena didn’t bring the rest of the girls. Helena says most of the girls have unionized. Edgar (and I) ask, “What the hell do you mean? Just make them do what we want!” Helena says that buyers won’t take too kindly to whip marks on the girls. That is one of the most hilarious exchanges I could have ever expected in this movie. Most of the girls who were lured here, ultimately thrown into a bamboo cage, and held hostage are now unionized and refuse to be sold into white slavery.

Now, call me naive, but if that’s all it took, wouldn’t that solve the entire issue of sex trafficking like… overnight? Let’s just imagine for a moment that this movie became real life and history carried on from this movie. These girls are now Local 1 of the Sisterhood of Sex Trafficked Ladies. Would they end up sending representatives around to various labor camps and dingy dungeons to spread the gospel of the union? As bad as sex trafficking is, and, yes, as terrible it is, the level of bad is directly proportionate to the age of the person being trafficked, if all you had to do is say, “Yeah, no… We’re not doing the shit you tell us to do. If you have a problem, take it up with our union rep” that would change the entire thing and provide an entirely different situation.

Okay, iffy-ass jokes aside. There is one girl, Betty, in the cage that has an admirer. One of the guys who picked up the two men who came to see Edgar about restocking ladies is having an affair with one of the hostages. In fact, he’s Edgar’s nephew. He wants to help Betty get free. Edgar is not happy with this situation. He knows he was messing around with one of the girls the night before. Apparently, this kid, I think Edgar said his name is Chet, is a bit starry-eyed whenever a batch of girls come to the cage. The girl may feel the same way for the boy, but it’s not entirely certain at this point. She does want his help to get out and she plans to take her two friends with her.

Later, more girls are brought into the cage. In this scene, shortly after a scene in which Helena and Edgar fuck around, we see that Helena is a little interested in the ladies as well as Edgar. Whenever she looks over the girls and gets thoughts, it sounds like a rattlesnake is around. That’s maybe kind of neat, but it was really confusing the first time because I thought there was a snake in the cage.

Okay, so what is Amazon Jail all about… really? Well, there’s that whole white slavery ring. There are three girls, led by Betty, who basically refuse to do what Edgar and Helena want. However, when new girls are brought in, it seems as though Edgar and Helena each pick one to seduce and basically feed them some bullshit to bring them in line. For example, Edgar seduces one girl, Liz, by basically telling her that if she just does what she’s told to do, she’ll be “allowed” to leave “whenever she wants” and will become rich in doing so. While he is feeding her that line, one of the new girls, Mary, a more innocent girl who seems to be sick when she is brought in, is driven wild with sapphic pleasure by Helena. So it’s basically mental and physical games being played here by Edgar and Helena. As for our main trio of girls working with Chet to get out, they just remain snarky and defiant. While Helena doesn’t want to whip them because of how it will look to potential buyers and the other girls, their penance is to remain in the cage, which they refer to as the corral.

That is literally the entire plot. At some point, I expect the kid to help his girlfriend out and there will probably be some bloodshed. Beyond that, this plot is spiced up with lingering shots of tits and naked, showering girls, girls dancing in circles and smacking their butts up against old guys’ faces, and sex scenes that land somewhere between soft and nearly hardcore in intensity.

Edgar and Helena entertain some more rich guys to try to sell girls to. It’s wild how almost every scene kind of rewrites these two characters. Edgar talks about how he looks forward to selling the girls to these guys to make a whole assload of money. She bitches that all he ever talks about is making money. He then fires back that she always wanted to get out of this life so all he has to do is sell a few more “little girlies” and he will have enough money to lay at her feet and they can go anywhere she wants and they will live happily ever after.

These two characters are almost like they’re in a comedy or some sort of parody of hard-edged sex trafficking ball-busters. Helena bounces back and forth between being a fed-up wife and a lesbian warden. Edgar looks like David Lee Roth in a music video where he’s wearing a big mustache as a disguise… But also complains about doing paperwork and acts like a Tex Avery wolf when he sees naked girls. It’s crazy. The overall tone of the movie is consistent, but these two characters seem to trade off being a silly couple who snipe at each other and are madly in love with each other and hard asses from one scene to the next to the next.

Hilariously, there is a plan to keep Chet from getting to Betty. All it takes is Helena locking his door and preventing him from being able to get out. The party turns into another naked girl dance party with guys going wild. One of Betty’s gang, Angel, is there kind of looking over everything and keeping an eye out for something. When a guy tries pulling her into the orgy that is suddenly breaking out, she slips out the window. Speaking of slipping out, Helena tells Mary that she should join the other girls and she’ll find a man in no time. But Mary doesn’t want a man. She wants Helena. They slip off to, um, get off, but when it’s reported that one of the girls is trying to escape, Helena wants to know if Mary knew anything about the escape. Mary admits she was told to treat Helena nicely so she’s distracted so Angel could make a run for it and then not say anything about what she knew.

Edgar wonders if his dear nephew is involved, but Helena reveals that the kid was locked up in his room. Edgar wants Angel back dead or alive. Speaking of Angel, she’s made her way into the jungle and to a waterfall where a trio of naked girls are splashing each other with water. You know… Like all girls do when they get together to hang out at the waterfall. Right?

Like… Whenever there is water and girls are around it, they get naked and playfully and flirtatiously splash each other with water? I mean… That’s what girls do, right? That’s what movies tell me they do. They wouldn’t have lied to me, would they?

Anyway, not only is Angel found by Edgar’s goons, but the three girls who do totally normal girl things at the waterfall are captured too.

It’s kind of wild because both the girl above who was part of the waterfall trio and the actress playing Betty, Sandra Graffi, look like Kirsten Dunst at different points in the actress’ career. I feel like there must be something in the air in South America or in the water that comes off the Amazon River because even Elizabeth Hartmann could be what Kirsten Dunst will look like when she gets older.

So the movie takes a dark turn at the roughly halfway mark. Edgar and Helena are getting a little physical with each other. Edgar even drags Helena out into the rainstorm to initiate some rough foreplay. Not only were the three girls taken, but Angel tries to seduce one of the goons. She grabs the guy’s knife and uses it to stab him but he grunts loudly from the pain and the other guys wake up and shoot her dead. Angel may be done for, but the goons will have three more girls to bring back to Edgar.

Speaking of those three girls, they talked about having boyfriends. When the girls didn’t come back the night before, one of the girls’ boyfriends gets a couple guys and goes looking for them. They find some of their stuff and deduce they were kidnapped and probably raped. (Keep in mind this is a movie that exists in a world in which girls are forced into sex and every guy wants and takes sex whenever they want.) The boyfriend says that strange things have been happening in the area recently and he begged his girlfriend to not go without a guy around to protect them. The guys go straight to the police to report what’s going on and what might be going on.

The girls are brought back to the corral. They tell Betty what happened with Angel. Betty and Liz say that they need to figure out a way to get out of there before the same thing happens to them. Brazilian Kirsten Dunst is crying and fairly inconsolable. I think I should also refer to her as Curly-Haired Brazilian Kirsten Dunst because apparently, that’s what is going on up there when her hair is dry. Anyway, Mary, the one that I can’t quite get a bead on because I think she might be either incredibly immature and thinks sex fixes everything or she’s completely crazy, she comes over with her tits out and tells Curly-Haired Brazilian Kirsten Dunst that everything is gonna be juuuust fine. She then puts her oiled-up titties in her face.

Edgar gets word that the walls are closing in on him. Because the guards brought back those three girls, and they were local girls and not ones brought in under false pretenses for work from other regions and towns, the police began hunting for them. Helena wants them to pack up shop and leave town because it won’t be long before the fuzz will be breathing down their necks.

Suddenly, the guy who flies the plane to bring customers to Edgar, George, gets a visit from Helena. She says they need to get the plane ready and they need to leave together tonight. They’ve apparently been lovers this whole time? I’m not sure if the movie ever planned on telling us this in some way earlier in the story or if it was just like, “Eh, fuck it. Throw it in because why not?!?” I think Helena might fuck anything that moves. She likes the girls. She’s married to Edgar. She fucks the pilot. Maybe that’s why there’s always a rattlesnake sound accompanying her. She’s a snake in the grass.

Eh…

Anyway, plans are hatching all over the place. Helena is packing things up and gathering money to fly off with George. Chet got Betty stuff to get the guards drunk and stuff to escape. George is spying on Chet and tries to get the drop on him, but Chet beats the hell out of him. He then siphons gas from the jeep and sprays it all over the ground and the tires.

Now, one part of that plan was Chet getting Betty a bunch of supplies to help get the girls out, right? He made a REALLY big deal that she needed to make sure the guards got really drunk. He said it would dull their reactions and all that. Makes sense. Don’t want them to be able to shoot any of the girls like the one guy did to Angel. But I’m beginning to think Betty had a whole other plan because, yes, she gets the guards drunk and a couple girls let them touch titties and whatnot, but then…

BLABLAMMO!

Holy shit that was awesome. All of it was perfectly timed too. The girl kept the guys busy and then got out of the way in just the last second before that Molotov hit the door. The editing was perfect. The effect was great. The explosion was huge. Say what you will about this movie, that scene was amazing.

That’s not the only explosion either. Remember I said that Chet siphoned the gasoline out of the jeep and then spread it around everywhere? Thinking the explosion was a police raid, Edgar and Helena try to escape. They get in the jeep and it won’t start because it’s out of gas. Chet just lights a match and uses the trail of gasoline to get to the jeep and it explodes. He basically killed his uncle and aunt.

Forget the old saying that blood is stickier than hot babes. (That’s totally an old saying. Don’t bother looking it up. It is one of the most famous old sayings ever.)

This is something I’m not sure about now. The girls are free. Apparently, Chet just committed uncle-cide. I have to assume George was beaten to death earlier because Chet took the plane to find the guys looking for the local girls who were last captured. There is still 30 minutes remaining. The entire third act is going to be about finding the girls and leading them to safety. Why does that need a whole third of the movie? Well, they are worried that if they go the wrong way, they’ll get into the land that miners work on. One of the guys says that if the miners find them, they’ll never see them again. Jesus Christ, is everything and everyone in the Amazon into depraved sex shit and/or cannibalism?

Anyway, apparently Curly-Haired Brazilian Kirsten Dunst is not feeling too good. Mary is taking care of her by sitting her down and getting some water for her. Is it a headache? Is it a pain in her gulliver? Is it dehydration?

Never mind… It’s just a case of this movie not having Mary do any lesbian sexy shit lately. She’s getting that taken care of right now. The girl will be fine.

Seriously… I have zero idea what’s going on there. Not only that, we get shots of the trees that I assume Curly-Haired Brazilian Kirsten Dunst is looking up at while she moans at the water being shoveled into her bush. Then, the camera begins to pull in tight on the bushy bits. Then Mary nuzzles up to her and looks up at her like she’s simultaneously taking care of the girl and looking at her like she’s Mary’s mother. I really do think Mary is extremely damaged.

Betty discovers a couple guys camping out and she thinks they are a little too close for comfort. One of the girls thinks maybe they are some goons who work for Edgar. Betty says they aren’t. She has an idea of how maybe they can deal with these guys.

The girls put on vines and leaves and begin to molest the guys and ask them for food.

For some reason, the girls decide to leave the two guys naked and tied together dick-to-dick to cover their escape. There are three other guys these two were with. The guys should be able to explain that some girls came out of the jungle, messed with them, and then tied them up. Someone had to have tied them up and took their food. They could easily chase after them and give them trouble. I would even go so far as to say they didn’t even have to mess with those guys. They could have just kept their distance and kept quiet. Whatever.

Anyway, the next morning, They work their way through the jungle again and notice there are a lot of birds in this area. They decide that with birds, that means nests, and with nests, that means eggs. They go looking for eggs. One of the local girls gets bitten by a snake. She’s in such terrible pain and has such a bad fever, Liz decides to do what needs to be done to put the girl out of her misery. She takes a gun and shoots the girl.

Chet and the other guys from town dock near the mines. They hope to find someone who knows the area so they can get a guide to help them find the girls. The guys think it over and how much they are going to pay the guy who says he can help them and another night passes. Like, seriously… The movie is over. The movie has been over. Edgar and Helena are gone. The whole sex trafficking ring is gone. The girls are free. Chet went and got help. What the fuck more do we need to do here?

I guess it’s never too late to learn more about our main girls. So, that’s what we’ll do for a few minutes now as Liz and Betty reminisce over what life was like for them before being caught by Edgar and his goons. Liz remembers what it was like when she used to dance at a bar, the crowd reacting to her, and how she felt when she moved to the music.

Also, apparently, it’s time for Mary to lose her fucking marbles. She offers Curly-Haired Brazilian Kirsten Dunst something to drink. She declines. Mary insists. She still declines. Mary becomes enraged at the girl. This brings Betty over to defend the girl. Betty and Mary get into a fight. Mary picks up a giant hunting knife and says she’s tired of Betty’s shit and she’s gonna fix her but good. Mary actually gets the upper hand, but before she can stab Betty, she’s shot in the back by an arrow. I guess they got a little too close to the miners because they capture the girls and take them back to their camp. The guy running the mine wants the girls gone so they don’t get in the way of their work. The guys want them because they haven’t seen a woman in over a month and apparently that means that I guess they need to fuck or they’ll go even crazier.

Seriously… What world is this? I can understand someone setting up a whole ring by luring women from other parts of the country to a remote part of the Amazon. They promise better money and opportunity than what they could get otherwise. Then, they get essentially what would have been called Shanghai’d. That makes sense. But every single guy is completely insane if they don’t have a woman around to empty their balls into. It’s nuts. It’s so wildly unrealistic that you can barely string together the various scenes. It’s just kind of a series of vignettes.

Now that the girls have been caught by the miners, we meet the religious man who leads the miners. Why is it a religious man who runs the mining camp? I have no idea. But what I do know is that the priest running the mine is a gay man. He has a servant who is REALLY gay. He says all the miners are his lovers. However, they are also very hungry for women. He can’t control them after the day’s work is done.

This whole part of the movie is completely out of nowhere. Yes, we heard about the miners and the problems that they can cause. I did not expect them to be grizzled, and horny as fuck, and led by a priest who hates women and wants to fuck men. The miners are almost inhuman in how they act and how they want to want to use the women because it’s just been a month since they had pussy. It’s crazy.

Anyway, the girls prepare Liz to paint her up for whatever her plans are that she set up with the priest. Basically, the priest wants the girls gone and Liz wants to free herself and the other girls. Liz says she trusts the priest and she wants to get her hands on the gold so they can get the hell out of there. Liz starts doing a dance for the men while the priest talk to Curly-Haird Brazilian Kirsten Dunst’s boyfriend and some of the other guys while Chet and another guy sneak around in the treeline. The other girls plan to light the place on fire. The plan nearly backfires as the miners decide to go out and grab themselves a woman for their own. Liz gets grabbed by three guys, but the guys who came to the town to find the girls spring into action and Betty and the other girls start tossing torches around to light everything on fire.

The end is partially chaos and partially an Italian cannibal film. Liz is killed by the miners raping her. One of the other girls is killed by the miners. The only girls who survive are Betty, Curly-Haired Brazilian Kirsten Dunst, and the girl with the short dark brown hair. Chet and Betty remain together to start a new life while the other two women go back with the rest of the rescue party.

This movie is utterly bonkers. I’ve said it before and I can say it again many more times: it’s hard to get a handle on exactly what the plot and the characters really are from one scene to the next. I would be shocked if there was much of any kind of script for this movie. I could see this being something that was simply a series of concepts and the lines and the actual blocking were worked out before the cameras ran. Sure, I’m guessing some stuff was pre-planned, but considering the movie’s main plot was resolved after 60 of the 93 total minutes, the final 30 minutes found us in a situation in which it seemed like everything was spinning its own wheels. There was no reason to include the miners and the gay priest. There was no reason to kill one of the girls with a snake bite. There was no reason to kill all but three of the girls who escaped. It’s just a lot of throwing extra stuff into the pot to spice things up but there was no need when you already had a pretty solid stew going.

Is this a good movie? In terms of the women in prison genre, it’s not too bad at all. There’s less of a prison in the sense of a government-run correctional facility and just kidnappings, but all the rest of the beats are there. Lingering shots of gorgeous bodies and bare breasts, cruel situations that happen to characters who maybe didn’t have it coming. A lot of action in bursts and a bloody finish. All the trappings are there. The final third of the movie is not great when placed next to the first two-thirds. However, if I walked in on someone watching the movie and hadn’t seen this before, and it was right at the start of the third act, I’d be invested. All the pieces and vignettes that seem to make up each individual scene or act are good. It just sometimes feels like the movie also went through the blender and it led to this really fascinating movie that just kind of kept going and just told us what each scene was going to be and how the characters were going to react to the scene and it might be different than the scene before and it might be different than the next scene, but that’s just what it is.

That makes me somewhat nervous and excited at the same time for next week. That’s because I’m going right to Amazon Jail 2 for the next review. This comes from a different director and has nothing to do with this film. So not only are we getting ourselves a good old-fashioned sequel in name only, but we are also probably getting a movie that doesn’t really have a jail… which is a major part of the actual title of the movie. Join me here in seven days to learn more.

Until then, maybe don’t apply for a job that forces you to go out to the jungle to see what the job is before you actually know for sure what it is you’ll be doing.