Carry on Up the Jungle

I can't believe that of all of the films I've reviewed to date, not one has been a Carry On caper; let's put that right...

In Carry On Up The Jungle, the 19th film in the long-running British comedy series, The Carry On team tackle one of my favourite genres, the jungle adventure, sending up the legend of Tarzan with their own inimitable style of 'seaside humour', whereby virtually every line uttered is a thinly veiled innuendo and crazy slapstick situations abound.

Craggy faced Sid James plays fearless hunter Bill Boosey (Boosey by name, boozy by nature), guide for an expedition in search of the legendary Oozlum bird (which supposedly flies in ever decreasing circles until it disappears up its own backside). While deep in the African jungle, the group come face to face with the cannibalistic Nosher tribe, meet Ugh (Terry Scott), the long lost son of Lady Bagley (Joan Sims), and are taken captive by a tribe of women who need men for mating, all of which allows for plenty of smut and general tomfoolery.

Up The Jungle sees the team on top form, the ribald humour and double entendres coming thick and fast (oo-errr!) and the silliness in overdrive. With a patently fake gorilla on the rampage, a tubby Scott as an unlikely ape-man, Frankie Howerd 'oohing' and 'aahing' for all he's worth, Bernard Bresslaw in black-face as native bearer Upsidaisi, the gorgeous Jacki Piper as Ugh's love interest June, and buxom babe Valerie Leon in a revealing jungle outfit, this is unashamedly unsophisticated and terribly un-PC, and as a result, hugely entertaining.

9/10 (it should be noted, however, that my rating is as a lifelong Carry On fan).

RANKING Definitely in the top tier of the series but only just. With Carry On Screaming ranked as number 1 and Carry on England as number 30, this is a reasonably good episode although it is a bit of a thoughtless rehash of what they've done before.

TYPICAL "Predictability" is the essence of Carry On films and this epitomises this. Change the costumes and you've got FOLLOW THAT CAMEL UP THE KHYBER but without being quite as funny and with a less clever story. Frankie Howerd does the Kenneth Williams role and although he's less likeable, he does a reasonable job.

SEXY LADIES The other essential of a Carry On film is saucy, sexy ladies and this doesn't disappoint on that count. A tribe of scantily clad, sex-hungry young ladies provide that essential element as does Jacki Piper who certainly ticks that box as well. The saucy humour in this is still the naughty seaside postcard style before it evolved into something less innocent as the series progressed through the seventies. It's all good fun.

The African jungle, and Lady Bagley is part of an expedition to hopefully find her long lost son who disappeared years before, along with her thought to be dead husband. However this is no ordinary trip, Professor Tinkle is searching for the rare Oozalum bird and expedition leader William Boosey well and truly lives up to his surname. Not only are there problems in the camp, outside is numerous other dangers. Wild beasts, wild men and tribes unheard of by human ears before.

1970 saw the Carry On team begin the decade with one of the better offerings in the franchise. Boosted by the returning Frankie Howerd and Terry Scott to join Messrs James, Hawtrey, Sims, Connor and Bresslaw, Carry On Up The Jungle sticks close to the cheeky formula that had worked in the better series entries previously (think Carry On Up The Kyber from 1968). Originally intended to be called Carry On Tarzan (the idea was scrapped for legal reasons), "Jungle" plonks a load of British odd balls in the jungle and invite us to observe how they cope. Which of course we know is not going to be very well at all. Terry Scott steals the film as a blundering Tarzan type (a role apparently turned down by Jim Dale), whilst Howerd and James get maximum humour from their polar opposite characters.

With a simple plot and carrying the series innuendo trademarks on its snake bitten ... ahem, Carry On Up the Jungle is a charmingly funny series entry. 7/10

The Carry On team take on the whole idea of the noble savage, showing the escapades of a group of civilised nit-wits up the jungle. The horrors of an uncultivated life - snakes, gorillas, cannibals and matriarchy - are mercilessly exposed and, of course, in this situation the whole idea of human life boils down to the one sordid thing - sex. The plot, such as it is, tells of the search for the legendary Oozalum bird - a symbol which stands for the exotic Rousseau ideal but which, in the cold light of day out of the jungle, disappears like all pretentious nonsense up its own bum. The relationship between the jungle-boy and his woman is one of the best presentations of a nascent adolescent affair in the whole of cinema - every attempt to pursue a cultural or improving agenda collapses into another bout of rumpy-pumpy. The final joke is a great one - a place in civilisation is another tree house in the jungle and we realise that what has been satirised throughout is not a false ideal which is practised in the jungle but in our own backward and undeveloped urban lives.

Kind of a take on Tarzan films, this film stars a truncated version of the Carry On group, but it has Sid James, Joan Sims, Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Connor, Bernard Bresslaw, Frankie Howerd and Jacki Piper, so thats fine. Its basically the adventures of an African safari and the crazy things which happen, such as mingling with the animals, tribesmen and each other. The only person I would have liked to see is Kenneth Williams, as they could have written a part for someone scared of his own shadow and he would have been perfect for it. That said, the film is full of the usual innuendos that the Carry On films all have and this one is fun. Not the best in the series but still worth watching.