Perdidos no Kalahari

I have read most of the comments about Sands of the Kalahari, and like most of you have been looking for several years for the tape or DVD of this movie. Well, great news movie lovers, I found a site that offers the DVD of this movie and ships free. Price as advertised is 11.99. I have already ordered my copy and thought you would be interested in getting yours. Here's the web site. http://store.thesmallscreen.org/index.html Check under the action section. I saw this movie in 1965 when it first came out and was struck by the realism the movie contained. I think any one that likes action type films will surely like this movie. Of course Susannah York is also a very good actress and gives this movie an added attraction for watching it.

As you can read from others here, "Sands of the Kalahari" is one of those movies that if you saw it as a kid you're likely not to have forgotten it. It's also a good movie if you like to look at lots of shots of the desert (think: the beginning of "Planet of the Apes" [1968]) and people sweating. The plot concerns a small group of people that crash their plane in a remote area of South African desert. No one comes looking for them, so how are they going to get out? One is a woman, the rest all men. You can guess that things get tense and then mean. It make matters worse there's a nasty bunch of baboons living nearby and they look hungry. Why this has never come to video I don't know. The last place I saw it was on A&E some nine years ago. It was shot in Panavision, so it should be letterboxed. It was a Paramount film, so maybe if enough request to them are made it'll eventually come out on DVD.

... it's been haunting my memory for years.

All I can really remember (I'm 37, I must've seen it when I was 15) is a feeling of the vastness of the desert, the apparent futility of their situation, and an ending that I couldn't ever forget.

I couldn't remember the name, so I did a search in IMDb's 'Plot' category for 'baboons'. And up it came - good old IMDb! How I'd love to see this again, but I guess it'll never end up on DVD, and I'll be lucky to spot it on TV (even here in the UK, where there are dozens of movie channels).

Review: tough, after all this time, but this film - I think - started me off on a lifelong quest for films that DO NOT COP OUT AT THE END. My God, these films are so much more memorable than the rest. If memory serves, the final images in Sands Of The Kalahari are utterly chilling. Top marks to the team behind it. Fingers crossed I get to see it again one day. For impact, I'd put the ending up there with The Vanishing (1988), The Wicker Man and Runaway Train. I think ... hope my memory's not playing tricks on me!

Sands of the Kalahari is directed by Cy Endfield who also adapts the screenplay from the novel of the same name written by William Mulvihill. It stars Stuart Whitman, Stanley Baker, Susannah York, Harry Andrews, Theodore Bikel and Nigel Davenport. Music is by John Dankworth and cinematography by Erwin Hillier.

A raw survivalist thriller that finds a disparate group of people crash land in the deserts of Africa and promptly start to come apart as a group. Cue arguments, attempted rape, killings, animal slaughter, alpha male posturing and Adam and Eve complexes. The allegory is obvious but handled with skill by Endfield, and it all builds with great intensity towards a truly bleak, yet delightfully ambiguous finale. There's some over acting going on and the dialogue can stretch credibility at times, but yes this is a worthy entry in the survivalist hall of fame. 7/10

I am like most of the reviewer of this film in that it has been so long since I've had a chance to see it again. I saw this film as a child of 11 or 12. The plane crashes because of a enormous cloud/flight of locusts that so muck up the plane's engines that it cannot sustain the speed to remain airborne. Some of the most memorable scenes for me is when the survivors first find the melons. Then when they finally slay the desert antelope. And, of course the ending is something that you just have to see for yourself. This movie along with another movie, "The Lion" are my two lost movies that I fear that I will go to my grave not owning. How does a person go about pleading to Paramount pictures for the movies to be released on DVD to the public?