Jungle Manhunt

This is one of the better Jungle Jim entries.Although still low-budget with the usual stock footage it has some good things goibg for it.First of all,Johnny Weissmuller looks quite fit and shows off his physique twice in the film.He looked better here,than in his last Tarzan film.Sheila Ryan as Ann the lady photographer is a beautiful and spunky co-star.She looks lovely in a sarong in a scene where she is getting cozy with the lost football player,Bob Waterfield.(a real-life player).Also along for the ride are Rick Vallin as Jim's native friend,Tamba the Chimp and that great B-actor Lyle Talbot as the villain.A predictable JIM adventure,but still a lot of fun.

I seen Jungle Manhunt around two or three years ago and quite enjoyed it. I obtained a copy of it from the same source as I get the Bomba movies from.

A footballer is lost in the jungle and Jungle Jim and a party are sent to find him. Among the dangers they face along the way are prehistoric monsters fighting which are actually the usual stock footage from One Million BC.

As usual, Jungle Jim is played by Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller and the rest of the cast includes real life footballer Bob Waterfield as the lost footballer, Sheila Ryan and Lyle Talbot (Plan 9 From Outer Space).

Watching Jungle Manhunt is a good way to spend just over an hour one afternoon or evening. Enjoyable.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.

I had long been curious about the "Jungle Jim" movie series after reading about it in the Leonard Maltin movie guide. So when Turner Classic Movies scheduled three of the movies one afternoon, I decided to give them a look.

After watching them, I can understand why there's been little effort to resurrect this series into the minds of modern moviegoers. To be sure, there are some unintentionally hilarious things about this series. There is the frequent use of stock footage, which may not have been obvious to '50s viewers, but is very obvious today. Much of the outdoor footage is obviously not shot in the wilds of Africa, but on the desert landscape of California. Jungle Jim, on the flimsiest of excuses, goes swimming at least once in every movie, and the underwater footage is obviously filmed through the glass window of a tank. I saw the same stone staircase in *all* of the Jungle Jim movies I watched.

While there are some laughs to be found in these movies, there are also some unlaughable parts. Weissmuller was starting to show his age, sometimes looking significantly older than the age he actually was. And there's the treatment of natives in the movie. Despite the fact that the movies take place in Africa, the natives are played by Caucasians! (Though considering their simple-minded nature and willing to be bossed by Jungle Jim, people of African descent might actually be thankful.) As for THIS particular Jungle Jim adventure, like the others I watched, I found it to be (overall) somewhat dull and talky, though the use of stock footage from ONE MILLION B.C. and a shark/octopus fight (in a river in Africa?????) did provide some needed laughs. But at the end, I felt like I hadn't seen anything new. As I said in my summary line at the beginning of this review, if you've seen one JUNGLE JIM movie...

Football player Bob Miller (played by football player Bob Waterfield) gets lost in the jungle and is searched for by a female reporter who teams up with Jungle Jim. She wants to make a mint by taking photographs of him - Jim reminds her of the dangers of doing things for money.

They subsequently stumble upon a crazed doctor who has been kidnapping villagers to work in a radioactive mine, where he has discovered a way of making diamonds out of mineral rocks.

Starts out in its usual manner, full of peril with skeletal men and it's appears that it'll be a routine, yet watchable adventure, then in the last thirty minutes or so the throttle increases and it's just one cliffhanger to another with Jungle Jim taking on a Bond-like villain named Dr Heller, who likes to tell his prisoners ( Jim, Miller and the sexy Shiela Ryan) his plans. Just like a Bond villain. There's an octopus' fights, dynamite being stuck in a shark, cave holding diamonds getting flooded - they are mainly stock footages but it's done expertly. The plot is much stronger than usual with limited lengthy animal interludes, and the idea of a football player leading an inhabitants and helping them is a wild idea . It's a fun piece of hokum, not to be taken seriously, but enjoyed for its outlandish approach.

More of the same for Jungle Jim fans here as Johnny Weissmuller's jungle hero gets involved in helping Anne Lawrence (Sheila Ryan) in the search for a missing football star. The backdrop is one of dastardly doings by some nefarious character, who is instigating raids on villages led by the Skeleton Men. Cue Jim involved in a good quota of close call dramatics.

There's the usual cheap moments; bad rear projection, giant prop boulders that move when someone touches them, but these are the kind of things we tend to afford affection for these days. From drowning perils to big lizard, to fisticuffs and sexual tensions, Jungle Manhunt, without reaching the higher end of the franchise, never falters in its prime objective to entertain without pretension. 6/10