Gefangen in der Hölle des Dschungels

"Massacre in Dinosaur Valley" is a campy "Mountain of a Cannibal God" imitation which features lots of sleaze and plenty of violence.Director Michele Massimo Tarantini blends stomach churning gore like breast mutilation with tongue in cheek humour.The cast is pretty awful,but Italian trash veteran Michael Sopkiw("Blastfighter","Devil Fish")shines as a hero!I love the scene where Vietnam vet has his entrails eaten by cannibals!Anyway I'd recommend this one since it's nice and fun to watch.Check it out especially if you like cannibal flicks.

There isn't much to be said for "Dinosaur Valley" (aka "Cannibal Ferox 2") with the exception of some lovely young ladies who spend a good deal of the film naked and on the run. A plane carrying some truly oddball passengers, including the film's fossil-hunting hero Kevin and several scantily clad models, crashes in the Brazilian jungle. For those who survive, it is a fight to get back to civilization, through pirhanas, jungle animals, flesh-eating pigs, cannibals and a slaver who is running an illegal mining operation. The film is wildly overacted and the dialogue atrocious, but the location photography is noteworthy and the ladies are the kind all heterosexual men dream of. The film verges on camp, so you might as well laugh along with it. The gore quotient is so-so, the few special effects pathetic.

An anthropologist, Vietnam vet, his bitchy lush wife, scientist, his daughter, and two fashion models(??!?) on their way to dig up some fossils on Dinosuar island (there's no dinosaurs in the movie, don't worry, it's just a name) crash land in the midst of a jungle and must contend with various obstacles to their survival including cannibals, wild animals, and various other things. This movie is so goofily cheesy that I couldn't help but to enjoy it. Lots of gore as well as T&A (and some bush too) make this film go down so much easier. Add to that many quotable lines and you have a good bad movie.

My Grade: C+

The copy that I borrowed from a friend is titled "Amazonas". I have been a friend of all the Italian gore films, so that is why I checked it out. It has adventure, sex, and gore. It sort of reminded me of Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals in that it goes a little farther in the sex scenes then your average adventure movie. The copy I have is the uncut unrated version. So if there is a rated R version, I can imagine it just wouldn't have the same edge that the unrated version has.

My review was written in January 1987 after watching the film on Lightning video cassette.

"Massacre in Dinosaur Valley" is a poor Italian exploitation film, made worse by an intentionally misleading title: there are no dinosaurs or fantasy elements in this potboiler. Pic was lensed in Brazil in 1985 with "Stranded in the Valley of Dinosaurs" as its working title.

Format is in the corny vein of "Five Came Back": a bunch of folks are caught in the jungle and swamp when their light plane crashes en route to Manaos. Among the passengers are an archaeologist (Michael Sopkiw), a scientist who's killed in the crash, his pretty daughter (Susane Carvall, usually credited as Suzanne Carvalho) plus several other beauties. They're attacked by indians, fall prey to leeches and quicksand, plus the other tired gimmicks of the genre.

Sopkiw finally frees two girls from the clutches of the indians and an hour into the film finds fossilized dinosaur footprints. Just when the film might be getting interesting, the three survivors are captured by a creep using slave labor for his mining operations. The rest of the picture is devoted to the boring subplot of Sopkiw engineering another escape with Carvalho.

This sexploitationer mixes pratfall comedy, disrobing women and the usual gore carelessly.