Director Ruggero Deodato carried on the tradition of the Italian cannibal subgenre by contributing arguably the best entries in the genre, JUNGLE HOLOCAUST and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. While CANNIBAL dealt with a very human threat in a cannibal tribe, JUNGLE is almost a more grueling film in that the villain of the film is the setting itself, the jungle surrounding the adventure.
A professor crash-lands in the jungles of the Phillippines and is captured by a tribe of stone age men, who torture him and hold him captive to use as bait for food. He manages to entice a young tribal girl to help him escape. Deodato creates a tense, grimy look at mankind. His cinematography is constantly fluid, never stopping for a second, in endless trucks, dollies, zooms, arcs, and cranes. Amazing visuals! The musical score is excellent, as well, but I still liked CANNIBAL’s better. Lead actor Massimo Foschi is unbelievably good as the professor who undergoes mental and physical torture while kept in a cave. He witnesses the horrific punishments of the tribal people, including ants eating a man’s arm clean off.
Deodato makes the jungle the real villain in the story. The jungle is filled with harsh conditions and jungle noise that adds to the atmosphere and injects suspense and tension into otherwise normal scenes. The jungle becomes a character and what a character it is. It requires the professor to revert to his primal instincts and abandon all civilized thought, making a harsh comment on human nature in the process. Me Me Lai is excellent as the native girl who helps Foschi escape and Ivan Rassimov appears too briefly, but is good anyway. This film is no picnic in the park, it’s a bitch. By the end of the film, the viewer feels like they have been to Hell and back along with the protagonist. But that’s what makes this film work so well. To many viewers’ chagrin, Deodato, as he would later demonstrate in CANNIBAL, shows too much real-life animal mutilation.An alligator is torn apart while still alive, a snake eats a mouse, and other horrific scenes. It adds to the realism factor, but then again, that is broken anyway by Me Me Lai’s breast implants!
JUNGLE HOLOCAUST is obviously not for everyone, but I can’t recommend it enough. It is long out of print, but Grindhouse Releasing should consider re-releasing it. After taking on CANNIBAL FEROX and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, why not close the infamous “Cannibal Trilogy” with a remastered letterboxed DVD of JUNGLE HOLOCAUST?
