Euer Weg führt durch die Hölle

First the bad news. "Jungle Warriors" has about as much realism as a rat f...ing a grapefruit. More bad news, for a women in prison type, this seriously lacks skin. Still more bad news, Sybil Danning is basically wasted with not much screen time, and very little to do. She is however boldly featured on the DVD cover. The plot revolves around an uneasy alliance and drug deal between cocaine producer, Paul L. Smith, and Mafia kingpin, John Vernon. Drop into this jungle stew, seven no talent actress beauties led by Nina van Palandt who suddenly morph into jungle warriors, and that about wraps up the bad. Now for the good. The final showdown between Paul L. Smith and one of Vernon's goons is quite brutal and was for me the highlight of what must be considered bad news cinema. - MERK

My review was written in November 1984 after a Times Square screening.

"Jungle Warriors" is a routine actioner filmed in Mexico last year, notable chiefly for its interesting B-film cast. Poor pacing loads all the action into the final reel, a ploy not likely to please the target audience.

Lame structure shoehorns two stories awkwardly into one package: A big drug deal is going down in a Latin or South American country between Cesar (Paul L. Smith) and Don Vito (John Vernon) while Pan American Drug Enforcement Agency leader Michael D'Antoni is out to bust ehm. He has a secret agent on the job, one of five U. S. models on location with their producer (Marjoe Gortner) and photographer (Nina Van Pallandt) for a shooting session in the jungle.

Cesar becomes suspicious and shoots down the models' plane, taking them captive, to be tortured by his incestuous half-sister Angel (Sybil Danning) and serve as playthings for his men. The girls escape in time for a final-reel shootout between Cesar's and Vito's forces, just as the government agents also arrive.

This mixture of women-in-prison (in Cesar's dungeons) and the usual drug action pic is unconvincing, with not enough nudity to satisfy the exploitation film trade. Substituted is flip dialog delivered by a host of slumming actors, of which Vernon is the hammiest and Smith extremely low-key as the oversize villain who goes crazy at the end. Van Pallandt is ou of place as a macha femme and Danning, though well-cast as an "Ilsa of the SS-type nasty person, has relatively little to do. Picture's main in-joke is that prominent actors in the cast are killed off suddenly and unpredictably.

Tech credits are adequate, including a direct-sound English-language track.

This is an 80s actioner about as generic as they come, only without good action, without memorable characters, and even without sexiness (which should have been the point of putting fashion models in the jungle). The thing is, this could have been soooo much better if anyone really had put some passion into this project. The setup has a lot of potential, but nearly every single opportunity gets wasted by bad writing or directing. The pretty girls get no sexy scenes, the villains get offed in very uninteresting ways (and much too quickly - what a waste of Sybil Danning), the heroes don't get much heroing to do, and the jungle setting is used for maybe 10 minutes.

That the movie had potential is witnessed by the fact that I was able to sit through it without fast-forwarding; despite all its flaws it's at least quickly paced and loud - 5/10.

I admit that I might have had a higher opinion of "Jungle Warriors" if I had been able to see it in its full form; the Region 2 DVD version features many painfully obvious cuts that make the film more of a jumble than it already is (it would struggle to get a PG-13 in this form). What's left of "Jungle Warriors" is not that good, anyway: it only gets interesting when the girls are machine gunning down the bad guys, but that doesn't happen often enough (actually, most of the bad guys just kill each other off). Admittedly, casting Paul L. Smith and Sybil Danning as kinky half-siblings was an inspired exploitation idea, but Danning is actually kind of wasted in this film. *1/2 out of 4.

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).