Massacre in Dinosaur Valley (1985)
This Brazil-set cannibal epic from one of your off-brand Italian auteurs (Michele Massimo Tarantini) is an entry level one meaning that normal people will be repulsed by its buffet of brutal bilge that includes dollops of violence against animals, some gut ripping, people getting shot, impaled, raped, enslaved, drowning in quicksand, dying in plane wrecks, and having their breast scratched by a triceratops claw worn by a dude with a triceratops mask on.
Regular viewers of such Amazon atrocities as Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Holocaust, and Eaten Alive will likely view this film as a rather tame entry in the genre and I actually found myself wondering why it was so wimpy. (Only one brief scene of a guy having his stomach ripped open? What is this? A savage-infested jungle hell or a Sunday School?)
And what sort of tone is a movie trying to strike when at the end of things and after everyone but Kevin and his new girlfriend have met horrible deaths in the jungle, he explains that the helicopter he is attempting to pilot is swinging from side to side because it's a Brazilian helicopter which means it has inborn rhythm? Admittedly that was the third funniest bit in the movie behind the guy in the triceratops helmet and the time when Kevin called the evil slaver a "fat smelly bastard", but still, shouldn't he save the jokes until he's actually out of the jungle?
I suppose I should celebrate this movie for its differences rather than ram a pike up its ass like the other jungle movies would have no doubt showed us in close in detail. After all, we already have plenty of movies where survivors leave the jungle shellshocked from being violated, watching loved ones suffer unspeakable indignities, and having to see lots of out of shape natives in loin clothes running around. Why not have a film show us that you can survive all that with your sense of humor intact? Isn't that what makes us human while all those Italian-eating savages are, uh, savage?
In fact we can tell this one is going to be different right from the get go. I don't mean by the fact that it looks like a poorly shot documentary and suffered from the absolute worst dubbing that will ever tickle your cochlea. How bad are we talking? Let's just say that the elderly proprietor of the hotel everyone is staying at sounds suspiciously like he's the same thirty-five year old guy that provides the voice for most of Lucio Fulci's movies. The difference I'm talking about is the music.
Most of the time Massacre in Dinosaur Valley eschews pulsing Goblin-style organ and synthesizer music for some really bouncy good time tropical music though they do bust out some electric guitar I believe for some of the more dramatic scenes - like running through the jungle while headhunter arrows are shot into some guy's butt.
At the local hotel, we meet a doctor and his daughter. The doctor is an expert in dinosaur stuff and his daughter is an expert in bra-less jungle adventuring. She also manages to squeeze in a shower scene before departing for the savage land, but that's pretty much the extent of her character development. The doctor wants to visit good old Dinosaur Valley, but it's pretty cursed and is off-limits so it doesn't take him long to convince an unsavory French pilot (is there any other kind of French pilot?) to make a stopover at Dinosaur Valley so that he can poke around some rocks.
The star of our movie is Kevin (he's a bonehunter from the Boston Institute of Paleontology and carries around all his bones in a big crate) and he's literally just off the banana truck and laughably attempting to channel a little Indiana Jones with his outfit and humorous responses to difficult situations. This manifests itself in a rather needless scene in the hotel bar where he fights a couple of really big guys and gets his ass beat. Once in the jungle, he would lose most of his good naturedness (at least until the helicopter ride home) and spent much of the time getting thrown over waterfalls, outrunning natives in a canoe and being chewed on by hungry pigs. That probably explains why his jocularity deserts him for awhile.
Also along for the ride is a Vietnam vet and his ex-wife. The vet is one of those burn outs who doesn't mind crash landing in the jungle since he's a former Green Beret who did three tours in Nam. His ex-wife is a drunken nag who constantly makes comments about his shortcomings in the bedroom and you can't wait until the jungle gets its cannibal-infested mitts on them. And just to make sure we have all the conventions of the genre covered, a photographer and two of his fashion models come along for the ride as well. Until I started watching these movies, I never would have guessed that the headhunter population of the Amazon was equaled only by the supermodel population.
Once everyone is loaded into the plane, it hits a little turbulence over Dinosaur Valley and crashes there. The area is inhabited by a bunch of Indians that eat people so everyone is sweating that fact except the guy from Nam who feels like since he handled the Vietnamese, these Indians weren't going to be a problem. Yeah, except that the Vietnamese only wanted to kill you, not eat your heart and wear your bowels as a necklace. In any case, the crash wasn't without its fatalities and our cozy little group gets a little cozier once the French pilot, the doctor, and a fashion model get written out of the movie.
The survivors make their way out of the plane and into the jungle and decide to try and hotfoot it back to civilization before the Indians start running around the jungle like its their own personal drive thru. The Vietnam Vet assumes command and the group encounters the usual jungle related problems such as leeches and piranha attacks. After the photographer gets his leg shredded by some piranhas to the point where his ankle is just a bunch of bone with a little bit of hanging skin, Vietnam Guy stabs him to death with his machete.
Kevin takes exception to this even though it was clear that the photographer was just going to slow everyone down and whine about how he didn't have a leg anymore. Kevin and Vietnam Guy have a big fight that eventually results in Kevin (or at least a dummy sort of dressed up like him) going over some pretty rough falls. But don't worry, he's okay and eventually turns up again at some point. Vietnam Guy gets killed when the cannibals shoot him up with arrows after he stands around trying to decide whether to save his ex-wife from some quicksand (he decides to pass on that) and the doctor's daughter and remaining model are taken prisoner by the cannibals.
Since this is Dinosaur Valley, it only makes that the captives would be all dressed up like natives in order to be sacrificed by the guy wearing the triceratops mask and armed with the triceratops claw and since Kevin is played by Michael Sopkiw of 2019: After The Fall Of New York fame, it also only makes sense that a bumpy ride over some rocks wouldn't stop him from showing up and shooting everyone in sight with his shotgun. Thank goodness he managed to hold on to it while he was bouncing off all those rocks in the waterfall!
Once their escape is completed, the savage cannibal portion of the film is over even though there is still about twenty-five minutes to go. Next on their jungle tour is a layover at the local slaver who runs some sort of mine full of precious stones. He's a lard ass who has a bunch of locals in chains and makes them mine the stuff and he decides that Kevin's girlfriend would make a nicer girlfriend for his lesbian associate. (That must have been thrown in there to appeal to the "women in prison" crowd.)
The movie wraps things up with Kevin's escape from his pig pen prison, his revenge on lard ass, his freeing the slaves, him blowing up all the bad guys, and his hijacking of the helicopter. Somehow, when you list it all out like that, it doesn't sound as routine and low budget as it actually was. Clearly though, this movie was aimed squarely at those who are just beginning their foray into these jungle flicks, as the cannibal action was strictly at a minimum and every other bit of exploitation was played up. It's actually like two movies in one! You've got your half-assed version of an Umberto Lenzi gutmuncher followed up by one of those leftist jungle movies that indicts big business' use of jungle resources (i.e. forcing the natives to do free work) - kind of like Django Strikes Again, but thankfully only about a fourth as long.
This movie won't please the hardcore crowd very much since it tries to do so many different things and manages to do none of them to anyone's satisfaction, but on the other hand, for those of us who don't need another movie that dwells of the finer points of guys getting their nads whacked off and their brains scooped out, things move along at a fair enough pace so that we aren't pounded into numbed boredom by all the depravity these movies usual serve up. This is the kind of jungle flick to show your normal friends. They'll be adequately disgusted by both what's up on the screen as well as the poor production qualities, but you probably won't have to suffer their moral outrage as you would have had to if you tried to make them watch Cannibal Ferox or Cannibal Holocaust. Call this one a jungle flick with training wheels.