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Review

Although well known to trash movie aficionados as one of the harshest and most outrageous of all exploitation cinemas many subgenres, the infamous cycle of Italian cannibal movies actually got its beginnings via something of a fluke.

It was back in 1972 that prolific Italian trash director Umberto Lenzi helmed the pulp jungle-themed survival adventure Deep River Savages (aka – The Man From Deep River in which a hapless westerner becomes a captor and eventually a member of a savage cannibal tribe. Despite being a rather flatly handled and inauspicious in itself (and owing more than a little to Cornel Wilde's superb 1968 African survival adventure The Naked Prey) Deep River Savages proved a surprise hit at the Italian box-office and in addition also performed solidly in numerous foreign markets.

Looking to recapture lightning in a bottle the buck was passed to Lenzi’s fellow Italian exploitation journeyman Ruggero Deodato who five years later truly set the ball rolling for the cannibal subgenre with his notorious Jungle Holocaust (aka – Ultimo Mondo Cannibale). Despite featuring a very similar narrative to Deep River Savages (and two of the same principal cast members), Jungle Holocaust would prove an altogether more arresting and memorable viewing experience which upped the ante of Lenzi’s mundane effort in terms of both thematic intensity and graphic content.

Additionally Jungle Holocaust made a impact in the United States where it enjoyed a successful run on the famous Time Square Grindhouse circuit, appearing under several alternate titles. Despite being slightly trimmed for American consumption, Deodato’s film would earn itself a reputation as one of the most grueling and outrageous foreign exploitation titles to ever grace the screens of Times Square. With its status as a Grindhouse classic confirmed, Jungle Holocaust would play Times Square on and off for years either as a second feature or as part of blood-soaked exploitation and horror themed triple-bills.

With the cannibal cycle now in full flow, Lenzi would return to the fray feeling slighted by the success of Jungle Holocaust and keen to reclaim his status as the foremost purveyor of the subgenre he had unwittingly created with Deep River Savages half a decade earlier. This would result in a gory, misanthropic game of tit for tat between Lenzi and Deodato, which would swiftly take Italian exploitation cinema to its zenith (or nadir perhaps) of graphic extremity and pitch black nihilism. Lenzi would wade in with his bloody yet ridiculous cannibal greatest hits package Eaten Alive! (1980) and the hollow but hyperbolically brutal Cannibal Ferox (1981). Deodato meanwhile, would go on to direct Cannibal Holocaust (1980) – not only the epitome of the Italian cannibal cycle but also one of the most infamous and widely reviled exploitation films ever committed to celluloid.

Jungle Holocaust stars Massimo Foschi as American entrepreneur Robert Harper, whose life is altered irrevocably when he is one of the four passengers upon a private charter plane that crash-lands whilst searching for oil on the remote South Pacific island of Mindanao. Shortly after landing both their alcoholic pilot and his female cohort fall victim to the savage natives and their skillfully secreted mantraps, leaving both Robert and his good friend Rolf (played by Deep River Savages star and Italian horror/exploitation regular Ivan Rassimov) alone in the vast jungle.

In their desperation Robert and Rolf attempt to make their way down the jungle river on a makeshift raft resulting in disaster when the craft overturns in the rapids causing the two friends to become separated. Once alone Robert is soon captured by the cruel native tribe who soon drag him off to their lair where he is promptly stripped naked and toyed with before being thrown into an enclosed pit. As his time as the tribes captor passes Robert observes their primitive rites and soon realizes to his horror that the tribe are practitioners of cannibalism and are only keeping him alive so that they can in due course devour him.

A glimmer of hope appears for Robert when he is apparently befriended by an attractive and seemingly gentle natured native woman (played by cannibal movie regular and Deep River Savages returnee Me Me Lai). Seizing his opportunity Robert escapes from the tribe and with his savage female admirer in tow flees into the jungle. To his joy Robert is eventually reunited with Rolf (who is afflicted with a heavily infected leg wound) and the two men – with their cannibalistic female accomplice – launch a desperate bid to return to civilization with the vengeful cannibal tribe in hot pursuit.

Despite the openly xenophobic nature of its premise and the laughable claim that the film is based on true events (yeah right) one cannot overlook that Jungle Holocaust is a spirited, brutally uncompromising and all in all truly rip-roaring jungle adventure. Whilst Deodato still treads some morally dubious grounds to say the least, of all the Italian cannibal films Jungle Holocaust is the most akin of them all to a conventional film with traditional Boys Own jungle survival thematic at its heart and a solid, sympathetic central protagonist.

Unlike the stuck up anthropology students and crazed drug pushers of Cannibal Ferox or the morally bankrupt filmmakers of Cannibal Holocaust, Massimo Foschi as Robert Harper is one white man on the cannibal menu whom the viewer can actually root for in good conscience. Having been thrust into his hellish ordeal purely by awful chance, Harper is put through the wringer as he is subjected to a series of grim, protracted rites and inequities at the hands of the cannibals. Having been stripped naked and “explored” Harper is hoisted to the cave roof then released to fall crashing to the ground by the tribe who believe (due to having witnessed the aircraft) that Harper is able to fly. Following this Harper is thrown into a dank, foul-looking pit where cannibal children mockingly urinate on him and he is forced to compete for vile scraps of foods with a voracious tropical bird.

Through these harsh scenes Deodato ruthlessly succeeds in polarizing viewer sympathy in favour of the beleaguered Harper. In most cannibal pictures the flesh-loving primitives only turn nasty under provocation but in Jungle Holocaust the natives are a thoroughly ruthless, murderous and brutal bunch right from the start, treating Harper without mercy and perceiving the white man as nothing more than meat for the cooking pot. Resultantly the viewer shares in Harper’s growing despair and horror as he gradually realises that he has no means of escape from his ordeal and that his captors intend to eventually kill and devour him. Of course it helps that Foschi ( a serious and very talented Italian theatrical actor) is truly superb in the role, doing a fine job of conveying the despair and vulnerability of his protagonist yet at the same time his resolute, unshakeable will to survive. One cannot fault Foschi’s commitment to the picture for a second as he spends half the film stark naked and encrusted with mud and filth. It is highly doubtful that any current actor would ever throw himself into such a physically taxing role with quite the same conviction that Foschi does here. He receives fine support too from Ivan Rassimov who brings an earnest sense of eloquence to his role as Rolf whose hopes of survival gradually dwindle as his wounded leg deteriorates.

Although Deodato delivers little in the way of flair he not only does a textbook job of manipulating audience emotions but also makes masterful use of the films jungle setting. According to Deodato the films shooting locations were a six hour canoe ride from the nearest village and the films benefits from their authenticity thanks also to a combination of Marcello Masciocchi’s cinematography and the spirited zeal of Deodato’s direction. Deodato creates an overwhelming sense of the jungle as an uncompromising, alien environment in which the white protagonist is in constant peril with his enemies always in pursuit and his potential doom waiting around every corner. Indeed both cannibals and fate prove far less harsh than the cruelty of nature itself as the jungle becomes a unforgiving, oppressive green hell which ultimately proves both Robert and Rolf’s greatest adversary on their desperate bid for survival. It is fairly safe to say that no filmmaker - save perhaps for Deodato himself with Cannibal Holocaust - has used jungle locales to quite the same effect since.

While nowhere near as thematically disturbing as his later Cannibal Holocaust or as conscientiously sadistic as Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox that is not to say that Jungle Holocaust is not a brutally uncompromising effort in its own right. Indeed what carnage is on display is both extreme and ruthlessly misanthropic making this a film that is most assuredly not for the squeamish or easily offended. In one choice moment viewers are treated to a grim tribal rite in which one unfortunate savage found guilty of some unspecified crime has his arm lacerated in order to attract a swarm of flesh hungry ants which eat the flesh down to the bone. Later on we are treated to the spectacle of a native woman giving birth beside the riverbank. Nothing unnatural about that one might think, that is until the woman proceeds to messily sever the umbilical chord with her teeth and then tosses the mewing newborn into the river where it soon passes down the gullet of a crocodile. We’ve all heard of post-natal depression but this is ridiculous! The films gruesome highlight however proves to be a late scene in which Me Me Lai’s good-hearted cannibal girl receives a brutal comeuppance from her people for assisting Harper. In return for her defiance Lai is brutally butchered and then eaten. After having been decapitated and disemboweled the hollowed out shell of her body is then stuffed with hot coals, roasted and then eaten in unflinching detail. Without doubt the unflinching, protracted spectacle of watching an attractive young woman being beheaded, gutted and turned into roast meat must qualify as one of the most extreme and outrageous moments in exploitation history. It will surely come as little surprise in lieu of its gruesomely explicit content to learn that Jungle Holocaust has at various points been subject to a long history of censorship cuts and trims all over the world.

In fairness however to Deodato the gore in Jungle Holocaust is actually used fairly sparingly and far from being the be all and end all, mostly serves simply as the brutal exclamation mark on the end of an already powerful narrative. This reviewer would actually go so far as to say that Jungle Holocaust is more or less the only Italian cannibal film in which one could remove every frame of gore and violence without completely diffusing the films impact in doing so. In actual fact the most objectionable aspect of Jungle Holocaust is neither the messy flesh-eating or the copious amounts of “incidental” frontal nudity but some extremely suspect sexual politics which seem more at home in the stone age than the cannibals. Whilst fleeing from his captors Harper makes an impromptu break in which he savagely rapes Lai hard doggy style. Far from being traumatized by her violation Lai seems impressed by Harper’s brutal display of machismo and promptly becomes his willing, doting and subservient companion. In addition the Italian cannibal genres reprehensible calling card of genuine animal slaughter rears its ugly head as a large pythons brains are pulverized with a rock and a large crocodile is slit open from jaw to tail whilst still alive in a truly sickening scene.

While perhaps the most accessible of the Italian cannibal efforts Jungle Holocaust still makes for fairly uncompromising and grisly viewing material offering full frontal male and female nudity, rape, genuine animal slaughter, infanticide, mutilation and ultimately cannibalism amongst its numerous “delights”. Although the at times vomit inducing content will not be to some tastes, there is however little denying the status of Deodato’s film as a taut, gripping and unrelenting survival movie that is all the more mercilessly effective for having been exceptionally well-made and performed. So whilst weak stomachs and easily offended sensibilities are best advised to steer well clear, more adventurous viewers will discover an intense, potent and ambitiously entertaining jungle adventure, which makes a fine starting point for those taking their first tentative steps into Italian cannibal country.

Also Try... Cannibal Holocaust / Deep River Savages / The Naked Prey / Cannibal Ferox / Eaten Alive! (1980, Umberto Lenzi) / Mountain Of The Cannibal God.

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