Euer Weg führt durch die Hölle

A cheap cross between women-in-prison thriller and jungle adventure, JUNGLE WARRIORS is notable for featuring a quite incredible all-star cast mired in B-movie hell. You get the likes of John Vernon, Marjoe Gortner, Sybil Danning, Paul Smith and Woody Strode appearing in what is essentially a girls-with-guns story beginning with capture, leading to torment, then escape, and finally catharsis. It's all very cheap and cheerful, and surprisingly quite silly despite the grim subject matter.

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.

The Quick Pitch: A group of models headed to South America for a photoshoot are shot down while flying too low over a cocaine plantation. The women are imprisoned, tortured, and raped. They make their inevitable escape only to interrupt a high-level confab between the drug runners and the mafia. Much gunfire and bloodshed ensues.

Let me start this by saying that I'm usually a fan of WIP films - I love most of the stuff Pam Grier and Co were churning out in the 70s. Also, I realize that I watched a butchered version of Jungle Warriors. I know that lots of what most people call the good bits you find in a WIP were cut out. However, I'm not really sure any of the excised footage would change my opinion. Jungle Warriors is just too slow and predictable to be entertaining. I was bored out of my mind throughout most of the film. Throw in some pathetic acting, poor special effects, and lazy fight choreography and you end up with a real dud.

With that being said, one of the bigger issues I have with Jungle Warriors is the underutilization of Sybil Danning. When you watch a movie with Sybil Danning so prominently featured on the box/poster artwork, you want to see a movie with Sybil Danning. She's barely in the thing (at least my cut). And when she is, she really doesn't do much of anything.

As bad as the movie is, I did get a chuckle watching Paul L Smith do some serious running. I doubt he ever moved that fast in the rest of his entire life. Overall though, a real letdown from start to finish.

3/10

While filming a photo shoot in the jungles of Central America, an airplane carrying the producer and several fashion models is shot down and they are subsequently forced to travel on foot in order to escape the vicious drug dealers who are after them. Unfortunately, the producer named "Larry Schecter" (Marjoe Gortner) is soon killed and they are all taken captive and led back to the jungle mansion where the sadistic drug warlord named "Cesar Santiago" (Paul L. Smith) is anxiously awaiting them. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this film had some potential but the weak acting and rather meandering plot greatly affected the movie as a whole. However, for what it's worth, I thought the presence of Suzi Horne (as "Pam Ross"), Mindi Iden ("Marci") and to a lesser extent Nina van Pallandt ("Joanna Quinn") brightened the scenery to a certain degree--but that still wasn't enough to overcome the general lack of intensity and passion shown in this film. Because of that I have rated this movie accordingly. Slightly below average.

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).