Jungle Warriors (1984)

Absolutely brilliant

A different way of telling a story

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

While filming a photo shoot in the jungles of Central America, an airplane carrying the producer and several fashion models is shot down and they are subsequently forced to travel on foot in order to escape the vicious drug dealers who are after them. Unfortunately, the producer named "Larry Schecter" (Marjoe Gortner) is soon killed and they are all taken captive and led back to the jungle mansion where the sadistic drug warlord named "Cesar Santiago" (Paul L. Smith) is anxiously awaiting them. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this film had some potential but the weak acting and rather meandering plot greatly affected the movie as a whole. However, for what it's worth, I thought the presence of Suzi Horne (as "Pam Ross"), Mindi Iden ("Marci") and to a lesser extent Nina van Pallandt ("Joanna Quinn") brightened the scenery to a certain degree--but that still wasn't enough to overcome the general lack of intensity and passion shown in this film. Because of that I have rated this movie accordingly. Slightly below average.

A group of fashion models travel with their producer Larry (Marjoe Gortner) and pilot/guide Ben (Kai Wulff) to a South American jungle for a photo assignment. What could possibly go wrong?Jungle Warriors is worth seeing for any self-respecting fan of crap B-movies if only for its horrible theme song, which has to be the most tuneless bit of warbling ever to grace a movie. The woman responsible for this insult to music lovers everywhere is Italian singer Marina Arcangeli: I'm guessing that her surname translates as Archangel, but let me assure you that there's nothing angelic about her voice, which is pure audible evil, sucking at the soul with every screeching syllable.Abysmal title song aside, this film is a fairly routine piece of cheesy 80s European action with a predictably dumb plot: the models are captured by a gang of ruthless drug runners who occupy a nearby Spanish fortress and, after their male companions are killed (Larry is caught in a booby trap, Ben has his head hacked off), they are left at the mercy of the despicable baddies, who rape and torture them. Escape is, of course, inevitable, but how many of them will make it out of the jungle alive?This nonsense is made slightly more bearable thanks to a solid cast that includes seasoned genre regulars Paul L. Smith, John Vernon, Woody Strode, and Sybil Danning. Beware, however, of the severely edited R2 version of the film: the copy that I saw had clearly suffered at the scissors of the censors, the more extreme moments shorn of gore and nudity, making the experience rather frustrating for exploitation fans such as myself.5/10 (although it might possibly be worth a 6 with the juicier stuff intact).

A pretty irritating guy named Larry (Gortner) is in charge of corralling a bunch of models and flying them down to an unnamed South or Central American country (the movie itself was shot in Mexico). They inadvertently land in the thick jungles of drug-smuggling country. This particular gang of drug lords is commanded by Santiago (Smith) and his sister Angel (Danning). They have a team of thugs led by Luther (Strode). It's not looking good for the models, and making things even worse is that a mobster named Vito Mastranga (Vernon) and his associate Nick Spilotro (Cord) are collaborating with Santiago and Angel and are in negotiations for future highly illegal doings. With no prior combat training, the models are going to have to take up arms against their captors if they ever want to strut on the catwalk ever again. Will they be able to pull off this daring feat? You'd think - you'd REALLY think - that a movie about a bunch of models who get together and have to shoot a bunch of guns to escape the jungle and get back at the baddies would be a surefire formula for cinematic greatness. Or at least entertainment. Somehow Jungle Warriors manages to fumble this potential home run, to use a spot-on sports analogy. Lamely, the movie is talky, boring, slow, lacks action, and the worst crime of all is that it's not exploitative enough. To compare it to something, Raw Force (1982) is better, and Jungle Warriors kind of falls into that video store shelf-filler netherworld inhabited by the likes of other similarly-themed mediocre flicks like Savage Justice (1988) and Sweet Revenge (1987). Though to be fair and balanced, it is better than Mercenary II (1999).Perhaps you even saw this or the aforementioned titles collecting dust on the shelf of your local video store. Sybil Danning's face couldn't be much bigger on the U.S. VHS box art (as was the case with her "Adventure Video" series), but she is painfully underused in the movie itself. Another quite easy thing the movie could have done to improve itself would have been to include more Danning. Actually, pretty much the entire cast gets the short end of the stick somehow. Woody Strode says nothing, Danning is barely there, Paul L. Smith has no facial hair and does minimal fighting, John Vernon is in a veritable sit-down role, Alex Cord does what he can, and only Marjoe Gortner adds some Woody Allen-like spice to this mush. The models don't seem to have individual personalities.It's a plot we've all seen many times before, and they saved all the supposed action for the climax. Some pew-pew machine gun shooting and maybe an exploding helicopter at the last minute doesn't make up for all the waterfall footage we'd seen for the previous eighty or so minutes. But on the plus side, 80's buffs will be delighted to see a vicious-looking drug goon wearing an E.T. shirt, and a too-brief glimpse of the wardrobe girl on the fashion shoot who has a sideways ponytail and is listening to a Walkman with orange ear covers. She should have gotten her own movie, she was the best character. The whole thing tops off with a theme song featuring the aggressively abrasive, Lene Lovich-like vocals of one Marina Arcangeli. So it all ends on a bad note, literally.Jungle Warriors is unfortunately lackluster, and it should have been called, if we may borrow a phrase from ourselves, Jungle Slog.

A seemingly ordinary jungle action fare, this one benefits from a couple of notable twists, the main one being the group of heroines consisting of models! Although this probably helps to make this film utterly unbelievable, that is in turn heightened by good villanous casting, giving us no less than four major "bad guys", including the seldom disappointing Woody Strode and never disappointing Sybil Danning.Add to this mixture the total lack of any concern for realism, and you get what I call an entertaining little picture. OK, it's not a masterpiece on any level, but it is good at what it wants to be.Released on video in Finland in the early eighties.