Abominable Advent Calendar Day 20: Terror in the Jungle (1968)
Crapsterpiece Category: Awful Auteurs, WTF Were They Thinking?
Heads up: culturally insensitive (and ridiculous) portrayals of indigenous people
If you’re a true fan of bad movies—if your motto is, “no pain, no gain!” when it comes to craptacular cinema—if The Room and Fatal Findings are the bad cinema kiddie pool as far as you’re concerned and you need a new fix, meet your new favorite fixation: Terror in the Jungle.
Henry’s father has sent him on a flight to Rio to see his mother. On the flight are various characters who we’re introduced to as they board on the tarmac. There are some nuns, including one who looks suspiciously like Elliot Gould, escorting the body of a deceased sister. There’s an exotic dancer. There’s a woman who might have killed her husband. There’s a smarmy businessman. There’s a woman with a bird in a small cage. We spend quite a bit of time getting to know these people. The rock band that boarded even entertains everyone by singing their godawful song, “Soft Lips,” in what can best be described as Edith Bunker fright wigs.
But the plane inexplicably loses fuel and begins to go down. The plane is obviously a toy plane on strings, so this seems inevitable. The crew says they have to throw out the luggage to reduce weight. The woman with the suitcase of money refuses, and the contents are exposed. The woman with the bird helpfully offers the bird (bitch!). None of this helps, and the plane crashes into the Amazon River. Half the passengers die, including bird lady, cage impaling her face. The crew starts throwing the survivors into the river, where they’re immediately eaten by alligators. They toss the dead nun out of the coffin and put Henry and his stuffed tiger in it, floating him down the river among the alligators like Moses. Then the crew dies as the plane explodes.
This is the first 20 or 30 minutes of the movie.
Henry is found by the Jivaros, or rather a combination of some stock footage from a 1940s movie of what might have been the Jivaros and some other people in loincloths and Mo Howard wigs pretending to be Jivaros. (The entire $47 budget for this film apparently went for wigs.) Most of the Jivaros, including the leader, think Henry is the son of a god because he is blonde, but one of them wants to kill him. There is interpretive dance, because it’s mandatory in a movie this bad, and it’s the only way in which this film is predictable.
Meanwhile Henry’s father starts searching for his son with the help of a priest. They of course face many obstacles, including stock photography and piranhas.
Meanwhile the Jivaro man who wants to kill Henry ties him to a table to do so, but a fight breaks out, and Henry is rescued by a woman. Henry and the woman run away through what has suddenly become not so much the jungle as Griffith Park in LA. But nevertheless there is quicksand for Henry to fall in, and a python to menace him. But he’s saved by his tiger, which suddenly comes to life in a bit of magical realism. Try not to notice that the poor cat is chained to a tree.
This description doesn’t even begin to describe the jaw-dropping ineptness of this trainwreck. Henry is crying through the whole thing, and it’s easy to believe that it’s 1) real; 2) justified; 3) grounds for future legal action and years of intense therapy. If you want to understand why the film is what it is, read the original director’s review on IMDB. Totally worth it. If you’d rather just enjoy it without the backstory, go for it. Either way, this is a crapsterpiece of crapsterpieces, and it’s surprising it’s not better known in bad movie fandom.
