I have only seen two of Oswaldo de Oliveira's movies, Bare Behind Bars (1980) and Amazon Jail (1982), and I do not intend to watch any more. Aside from the fact that most of de Oliveira's work seems to be unavailable to English speakers, the entertainment factor of his movies is, in retrospect, not as great as one would think. Although the combination of virtually no plot, a lot of female nudity, horrifyingly hideous sets, subterraneous performances and dilettantish camera work sounds like the perfect mix for a lot of laughs and head shaking, the head shaking ultimately outweighs the laughs, and especially with the unbelievably bad Bare Behind Bars, it gets very difficult to tolerate it to the end. Granted, the sexploitation genre is not famous for its artistic value and insightful creativity, but de Oliveira seems to be an especially ungifted representative of the genre, wholly unaware of the intricacies of storytelling, or commonsense rules of camera movement, editing, and even genre tropes. And what I could gather about his view of femininity is not very original either.
Bare Behind Bars and Amazon Jail are basically the same movie. Both feature female captives that are being sold to sex craving criminals, both follow a more or less unrealistic escape plot that involves a surprising amount of nudity, and both end in a fugitive-like sequence with the ungainly women shooting their way to liberty, only to be brought back to their prison in the end. Obviously, both films exist solely for the purpose of showing as much sex as possible, and where Amazon Jail at least attempts to justify the constant fornication sometimes, Bare Behind Bars doesn't bother with something as nonrelevant as plausibility, and frequently cross-cuts between as much as three simultaneous sex scenes that are not explained in advance or posthumously.
Sexploitation movies are, of course, not the perfect arena for progressive feminist thinking, but judging from these two offerings, de Oliveira seems to be a particularly fervent opponent of female liberties. Not only does he relish in imprisoning and torturing his female characters, but their escapes always end in a clusterfuck of epic proportions. They are also baselessly mean and sadistic, belligerent towards men (in Bare Behind Bars, one of the fugitives cuts off the penis of a man she encounters), bitchy to one another, and, let's be honest for a second, simply sluts (Bare Behind Bars, again, makes it much more explicit when a disappointed lover of one of the fugitives shoots her after surprising her with another man). All of this is not particularly shocking for the genre, but de Oliveira does not have anything interesting or new to say about all of this. Other than zooming into hairy ladyparts, he does not know what to do with his disdain for women.
De Oliveira is also simply clueless behind the camera. I am willing to forgive his inaptitude as a screenwriter because he masterfully fulfills his self-set goal of showing as much frolicking as possible. The unpleasant nature of his visuals, on the other hand, is a lot harder to bare. The set for Bare Behind Bars has to be one of the worst choice of location I have ever seen, and while the outdoors of Amazon Jail makes for a nicer setting, the hideous interiors and shaky "tracking" shots are simply out of this world.
In the end, although I had a certain amount of fun watching these movies, there are simply too much objectionable facets of de Oliveira's oeuvre to appreciate it indiscriminately.
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