More vintage Italian horror, this one by the prolific director Umberto Lenzi, who made a whole mess of trashy horror in the 70s and 80s, and is most known for his cannibal movies (which were pretty trendy in Italian horror in the 70’s and 80’s).
This movie was filmed the year after the People’s Temple massacre, and there was a lot of public interest in Jim Jones, so Lenzi capitalized on this by setting the movie at a suicidey death cult in New Guinea. The movie also incorporated footage from OTHER previously released cannibal movies into this one, because why reinvent the wheel when you can just steal other people’s wheels instead?
The movie begins with random New Yorkers getting killed by an islandy guy with a blowpipe. This has nothing to do with anything else on the movie, but police find a copy of an 8mm vacation movie belonging to the protagonist’s (Sheila’s) sister, who is missing in the jungle somewhere. This seems like a strange thing for a stone-age assassin to just be carrying around with him while he’s out killing people, but okay.
They follow a few random leads, not sure where they came from, but it gets Sheila to Mark, who will be her guide into the jungle for $20,000. Five minutes later they’re at the place… then locked up in a shed, then they watch a generic campfire ceremony involving a dude in a scary mask bobbling his head around while the crowd folds their arms and frown.
I should also point out there’s a bit of actual animal killing footage scattered around at random, so if watching animal snuff freaks you out consider this a warning. Deodato did the same thing in Canibal Holocaust, it must be a thing.
The pair breaks out and finds a couple of dudes to paddle them (huh huh huh) down the river. A few dead monkeys later their boat gets eaten by an alligator. Dang. Then the guides steal their stuff, but then gets chopped up and eaten. Then some lady is gathering fruit, until she gets raped, chopped up and eaten. Fun vacation! They’re lost in the jungle, cannibals at every turn, so we might as well have a quickie by the fire. By the morning a band of cannibals find them and escort them to the Jim Jones camp, where a guy with Jim Jones hair explains the cult’s fucked-up mission, and oh, you two live here now and will never leave so let’s go have some cobra venom! Then we can watch a funeral of one of our members while we play Toccata and Fugue on the loudspeakers.
While the NYC police try to figure out “Where in the world is Sheila?” all manner of Jim Jonesy shenanigans are happening on cannibal island. Sheila has sex with a dildo covered in cobra blood, the congregation drinks trippy dippy juice and watch some rando get chopped up, we get some Komodo dragon barfing, a whole bunch of snake killing, some caveman castration, a lot of people nodding knowingly to each other, a whole lotta long-haired naked grunty dudes and at least a thousand boobs. Some of them spray painted gold, even, for no reason at all.
I should point out, now, there’s a lot of boobs, and a lot of boinking in this movie. Whole lotta boobs and boinking. So don’t watch it at work. Most 70s and 80s Eurosleazey movies you probably should consider to be “unrated” versions. Not a lot of holds barred. It’s like the Wild West out there! What a great time to be a filmmaker. I mean you don’t even have to be very good at it – just show a lotta boobage, kill a monkey here and there, and you too can have, well a box office flop in this case.
The whole Cannibal Boom in shitty Italian movies of the period started around ’72 and ended in the mid to late 80’s, and are pretty cookie cutter… islands in the Pacific, uncontacted stone age tribes, plenty of gore, plenty of nudity, plenty of sex, and often non-simulated animal cruelty. Rinse and repeat, and basically rip off the ideas of all the cannibal films that came before yours.
On the bright side of exploitative filmmaking, in this instance, you get to watch a mongoose fuck-up a cobra. I’ve never actually seen that, and always kinda wondered how it works.
Is it good? The movie? No. Is it fun? Kinda. It has its moments. Mido slept through some of it, but perked up at the scenes killing snakes and iguanas. “Yeah!” she meowed at the TV, “You kill those bitches! Reptile scum!” Mido has gotten a little racist in her old age.