The One that Started Them All?

squeezebox

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/