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 This is a "horror thriller" that takes place in the jungles of New Guinea.
Star Ursula Andress is described as a "ravishing beauty." Stacy Keach and a
search party go with Andress to find her husband who is "missing in the
unforgiving jungle." Various things they must survive include "cannibals,
crocodiles, snakes, human sacrifice and supernatural forces." They claim that
the "highlight" of things is when "Andress is stripped naked and forced to
participate in a primitive ritual ceremony." The write-up closes by saying
that this film is " not for the faint of heart." 1978, 95 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
You all might remember when we took a look at Cannibal Ferox about a year and a half ago. That was one of those Italian movies where
people go into
a jungle full of backward cannibals and get their asses eaten off in very
graphic and detailed ways. I think we can all recall what a sleazy pile of
crap that movie was, though I'm sure it made us wish for a jungle cannibal
movie done with a little class. Slave of the Cannibal God tries to be a cut (ahem) above the rest with it's decent production values and
stars that you've actually heard of. Inevitably it falters in many of the same
ways as the much more gory Cannibal Ferox, but doesn't quite leave as bad a taste in your mouth (tastes like chicken!).
Ursula Andress, whose life pretty much comes down to a single bikini-clad scene
in the first Sean Connery-James Bond film Dr. No as a woman named Honey Ryder, stars in this tale of a couple of dumb whiteys
tramping around in dense
and remote jungles near a forbidden mountain who run into all sorts of mayhem
along the way. Her name is Susan and she's one of those older, sexy broads
that always seem to be batting their eyes at gringos who've been in the jungle
too long and fall under her spell so that they agree to lead an expedition to
rescue a loved one that is certain to result in a long, drawn out, demise
involving the pulling out of intestines somewhere along the way. This time,
Susan is with her brother Arthur. She's searching for her world famous
anthropologist husband who went into the jungle in New Guinea or somewhere and
got
his dumb ass lost. Only one man has the knowledge and lack of brains to lead
her expedition and that is the always grubby Stacy Keach. Mr. Keach may be
familiar to you for his stint in an English prison on cocaine smuggling
charges, or his roles in a couple of Cheech and Chong films (obviously part of
his probation).  Now, this place we're talking about is a really big jungle and there's islands
and all kinds of stuff and no one seems to know where Susan's husband went.
Luckily Dr. Edward Foster (Keach) remembers that he told Susan's husband about
an ultra-secret mountain on a forbidden island. The mountain or the island is
named Rei-rei-me or Yo-yo-ma or something and you see there's a whole bunch of
superstitions around it that would indicate you would be a fool to attempt to
go there, a fool I say. So armed with pure supposition and absolutely no
evidence that this is where the missing husband is, Dr. Eddie, Susan, her
brother, and some natives (including a houseboy of Keach's that seems to be a
bit too close to him if you can smell that particular meal I'm preparing) all
board a helicopter and get themselves dumped off into the middle of nowhere.
Foster decides they should all make for the shore since the plan is to be
dumped in the middle of nowhere so that no one will know where they are and
then head for the shore, blow up some inflatables and paddle off to the secret
island where certain doom awaits all who enter. For some reason, they think
they have to do all this in secret because the government would get mad at them
if they just went tearing into the Cannibal Mountain National Park without
authorization. So they swim over to the island and they find some clues that
her husband had been there. The also find dead lepers, but I'm not real sure
what that had to do with anything. It did allow us to see some really cool
dried up corpses though. Now, there's also some tension brewing between Arthur
and Dr. Foster about how things should be run and it invariably ends up with
the prissy Arthur getting punched out (come on, Keach has been to prison!).  One of the problems of taking a really sexy grandma like Ursula along on your
remote jungle safari is that she's going to fall down a lot and get herself
into trouble with a variety of critters. The first instance of this involved
her falling over a tree root or vine and getting tangled up in it so she
couldn't move. All the while, a big, hairy tarantula ambled slowly over to see
what was up with the little missy. Keach immediately takes a knife and heaves
it
into this thing and we get to watch it die on camera (thanks for that). The
natives who are along for the ride get all wussy on us and decide they need to
sacrifice a live iguana to whatever freak god they think cares about whether
Mike Hammer wasted a bug. So then we are treated to an extended scene of a
bunch of these losers slicing this thing open while it's still alive and
pulling out its guts and eating the yucky junk that they extracted from it.
Foster's houseboy/lover takes a big old bite out of what was either Iggy's
heart or his nut sack. Arthur and Foster watch all this from a distance and
have a conversation about how icky all this stuff was. I think Ursula must
have been working on her hair during all this. Standard jungle-cannibal
cliches happen from here on out: there's more fighting with Arthur and Foster,
natives get scared, pee their pants and runaway, guys in masks appear and start
killing people in gruesome ways, you know - that sort of thing. One of these
guys in a mask terrorizes Ursula and she tries running away but you can imagine
how that goes. Just when she's about to get a spear in her face, she's saved
by some white dude we've never seen before. His name is Manolo and is some
kind of
doctor that just happens to be wandering around the secret and forbidden jungle
waiting to bail out hot seniors from certain death before they wet their
Depends. He saves Ursula and leads what's left of the party to a village run
by a missionary named Father Moses. He's old buddies with Stacy Keach's
character which makes me wonder why Stacy didn't just head there in the first
place. Here we get some backstory on Dr. Foster and his experiences in the
jungle. Years ago, Dr. Foster went out looking for the mountain of the cannibal god and
ran into the Puka (Pookies to their friends). The Puka are an ancient tribe of
vicious cannibals that worship a cannibal god. Foster was captured by the
Puka but cured the chief's son of some illness like malaria or the clap or
something so they let him live with them instead of having Stacy-fritters for
dinner. Dr. Foster tries several times to escape because he doesn't like it
there and they make him eat human flesh and finally he does escape and gets
back to civilization, but remains haunted by these events to this very day.
It's pretty healthy that he's leading the expedition and says stuff like ,"if
any of them are left, I am going to kill every last Puka!" Um, wasn't there a
husband we were supposed to find? And speaking of the very worried and most
likely widowed Ursula, she's taken quite an interest in this Manolo character.
They make goo-goo eyes at each other and she kisses him and I'm starting to
think that this movie is veering off the beaten path as far as typical Italian
cannibal jungle movies go. All is not what it seems, but we have no time to
worry about that because Arthur is humping a native girl and she gets stabbed
by a Puka and then Keach goes after him and gets chopped in the leg and
eventually somebody kills the Puka. The mask is removed to reveal that it is
the houseboy/ex-boyfriend of Stacy Keach. The little snot had run off awhile
ago. Keach now adds this nugget to his secret origin: this kid was the
chief's son that he cured and when he escaped he took the kid with him because
he really knew his fabrics. At this point, Father Moses puts all these losers
on suspension and tells them to git out of his peaceful village with your
cannibals and humping and secret origins. Ursula has convinced Manolo that
older is better and he joins the group and they head off to Cannibal God
Mountain. I was starting to wonder what was going on with this movie because
it was becoming obvious that Manolo was suddenly the main character while
Keach's character had been relegated to the role of crazy-guy-bent-on-revenge.
I was trying to puzzle out this turn of events when suddenly I notice that
Stacy is climbing up a bunch of slippery rocks in a waterfall and needs Arthur
to
help him, but Arthur just looks at him like, "do I even know you?" Then
Keach's grip slips and I busted out laughing as he slips down all these rocks,
smacking his baby-skull on every one of them like a rag doll and ending up a
dead pile of mush in the river.
Funny stuff. To let us know that Manolo is now the chief good guy, he
gives Arthur a really
dirty look for pretty much killing Dr. Foster.  The movie's getting close to over so it's time for director Sergio Martino to
pull out the "doublecross." Arthur, Susan and Manolo are the only ones left
and they finally arrive in a cave where the body of her husband is found, all
mummified and with a ticking Geiger counter rammed into his chest where his
heart should be. This is the cannibal's god. Susan and Arthur reveal their
nefarious scheme around this time. There's lots of uranium in the Cannibal God
Mountain and they needed some dope to lead them to it. Once they know where it
is they plan to sell the location to the highest bidder. Her husband was after
the same thing, but she didn't want to share with him or he wouldn't share with
her or something so she wanted to beat him to the punch. Luckily for her, the
Puka got him before he could reveal the location. Unluckily for her, the Puka
have just come back to their cave from the store and attack, killing Arthur and
capturing Susan and Manolo. The Pookies eat Arthur and lather up a nekkid
Ursula with bronzer and tie her to a bamboo thingamajig. Some Pookie sneaks up
on her and tries to rape her, but he's caught by other members of the tribe and
his weiner is chopped off. Eventually, Manolo gets loose, kills a bunch of
Pookies, rescues Ursula and escapes for good. Well, this one was better than Cannibal Ferox, for whatever that's worth. It didn't look nearly as scummy as that movie and
actually having actors of any caliber in it helped to make it infinitely more
tolerable than Umberto Lenzi's scurvy flick. It wasn't as gory as the
other one and didn't seem to take a demented liking in creating new and
exciting ways to kill people (the table with the hole for the head to stick out
of in Cannibal Ferox comes immediately to mind). That said, it still suffers from many of the same
problems as that film. Chief among them is the real animal abuse that occurs
in the movie. In addition to the spider and iguana torture previously
documented there is also a scene where this little monkey gets strangled by
this really big snake. We have to sit and watch this monkey's face as its head
is squeezed so hard blood oozes out of its scalp. The best part of this scene
is
that it has nothing to do with anything in the movie. It's just a scene
inserted, presumably to show the heartless savagery of the jungle. Yeah, I
think I got the point when this crocodile bit a man's entire arm off or when a
guy got impaled on a bunch of stakes or when a dude's head got lopped off.
Obviously this is a must see for you Ursula freaks out there who are out on
bond or
house arrest, but for the rest of us? I'm not really sure who this is aimed
at, since it's not nearly as over the top in the gore department as Cannibal Ferox, but it's still so slimy, no regular film-goer would ever want to sit through
it. Not really a bad buy at $6.99 for a pretty decent print on DVD if you
don't mind supporting animal cruelty and Stacy Keach's career, but don't expect
it to be anything you'll remember one way or the other. Your average Italian,
cannibal, jungle movie, with C level movie stars slumming for whatever money
they could get. Jeez, Ursula, at least Stacy didn't have to get buck naked and
lathered up with bronzer! (Thank God!)
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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