The One that Started Them All?
JUNGLE HOLOCAUST is a brutal, no-holds-barred early entry in the bizarre cannibal subgenre of the seventies and early eighties.It's shocking, violent, immoral, sleazy and exploitive.In other words, it delivers.I can't defend this movie from an ethical standpoint.Even the observation that the live animal slaughter (which is fairly minimal here) is committed by people who apparently were members of a real tribe of primitives, as part of their daily routine doesn't change the fact that it was shot for purely sensational purposes.But it is undeniably intense, suspenseful and creepy.
A plane lands in the Amazon wilds while searching for a couple of lost explorers.The people in the plane wander off a little too far and become separated.The movie then follows one of them, who is captured by a tribe of cannibals and kept prisoner for months.He finally manages to escape and kidnaps a young, beautiful female member of the tribe to use as a guide.
The movie has a gritty realism to it that makes it play almost like a documentary.It captures the gradual transformation of the character from a "civilized" man to a grunting "savage" extremely well, although a scene in which he wins over his female companion by raping her is a little over-the-top, to say the least.
The midsection of the movie is almost entirely devoid of dialog, so the atrocious dubbing is confined mostly to the first and last sequences. Overall, it's a very well-made and unsettling thriller, although it would have been far more suspenseful had there not been a disclaimer at the beginning saying the main character survived to tell his story.
score /10
squeezebox 26 April 2004
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0164051/35042
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