Oasis Of The Lost Girls — Oasis Of The Lost Girls(DVD)

Oasis Of The Lost Girls is a grimy slice of unapologetic sleaze from the 1980’s. It was originally put out by notorious French erotica & exploitation studio Eurocine; who of course put out some of Jess Franco’s more openly perverse & simplistically sleazy features. On Full Moon Features here we have a recent region-free DVD of the film, and I believe this is the first time the films been put out on DVD.

Released in 1982 Oasis Of The Lost Girls( aka Police Destination Oasis, L'oasis des filles produces) is a somewhat haphazard blend of the Women In Prison genre & lo-fi action picture. The film features some quite unpleasant, though soft-core rape sequences, oodles of cavorting female flesh, multiple flashbacks, random footage of monkeys, oh & a few very glittery & campy disco scenes. The film was directed by  José Jara( here as John O'Hara) who only had only had two other late 70’s directorial credits- El transsexual,  & Las cuatro novias de Augusto Pérez- and to be brutally frank technically the films all over the place- with bad editing, terrible audio, deplorable lighting,  badly blended stock footage, and a very haphazard structure.

The plot tells of a group of four or five women who are kidnapped from various locations around Europe, then sent via a boat to an African brothel for tourists. We follow each woman from their kidnap( often shown in flashback), onto the boat where they are mulled & raped, then into the brothel,  to lastly be rescued by the authorities.

Since getting further & further into lower/ lesser filmography of Jess Franco- I’ve found that I’ve rather developed a fascination with bad euro- sexploitation, and that’s handy for Oasis Of The Lost Girls- as by any conventional standards this is pretty dire all round, with door like acting, confused plotting, and highly clichéd characters.  But as a low grade, but fairly eventful euro- sexploitation this isn’t half bad. The films tonal flow is wonderfully unbalanced as we move from campy & cheesy, through to sleazy & rather unpleasant, onto mockingly dramatic & ham-fisted action sequences. You really don’t know where it will lurch off to next- meaning there’s never really a dull moment in the films just under an hour & twenty runtime

This DVD edition of the film is the English dubbed version of the film- and really both the picture, and audio are still fairly ropy- with at times the sound badly crackling, and cutting-out in places- but I guess with this type of film, and its limited audience you can’t expect a grand remaster job. Beyond a selection of other sexploitation & Full moon trailers, there are no extras here- so it’s very much a barebone affair.

So in conclusion with this issue of Oasis Of The Lost Girls, it’s nice to see Full Moon uncovering another forgotten sleaze from the Eurocine vaults…& really by now I think you’ll know if this is for you or not.