Cuidado Que o Bicho Pega

The Carry On Gang get up to their usual monkey business, this time spoofing the Tarzan movies. This isn't their best effort...the script tries to fit in too many jungle cliches for its short running time, leading to a rather disjointed mishmosh of storylines. However, there are still many funny lines, and the Carry On regulars and semi-regulars (especially Frankie Howerd as the fussy professor) are in fine form. All in all, a very amusing way to spend 90 minutes.

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.

Speaking to an audience of keen bird watchers, Professor Ingio Tinkle tells the story of his latest exhibition into the African jungle. Part of a party led by adventurer Bill Boosey, Tinkle and his colleagues (including Lady Bagley and her maid) are on their quest to find the Oozalum bird when they come under threat from a ruthless tribe and their guides refuse to continue with them. However things become more complicated when the group are discovered by a man of the jungle who was raised by monkeys and has never seen other men (or women!) before.

As one would expect with a Carry On film, this is full of innuendo, sexist and occasionally racist humour with a very vague plot to set it all within. Needless to say this film continues the trend and it isn't long before the plot (something about finding the Oozalum bird) is lost in a sea of bed swapping, mistaken partners and innuendo. For fans it is funny but it is nowhere near the best of the series as none of it is really that clever – most of the gags are obvious and, although amusing, few made me laugh out loud and they didn't feel like there was any inspiration behind them. Modern audiences may find the sexist stuff a bit uncomfortable but to be honest, what did you expect from a Carry On film? There is a touch of racism although this too can be forgiven as a product of the period – although it is not as direct as you'd think, instead it is implied by the rubber lipped tribesmen and the fact that only white people are allowed to speak (the main 'black' character is Bresslaw!) or by having the women tribe be mostly white or light skinned – because 1970's audiences weren't ready for the sight of a white man having sex with a black woman (even implied). However the one racial joke I thought was clever was Sid James wondering why the same guide gets accidentally shot every time (the point being that it isn't the same one!).

The cast feature most of the regulars who are good enough comedians to be able to work with even this average material. Sid James does his usual stuff; Howerd has some very nice lines that hint at his sexual orientation although Connor is a bit flat when viewed next to him. Terry Scott is OK but has the least role of the film (although it is amusing that he stars with a character called June). The women have the usual short stick but both Sims and Piper are quite good. Hawtrey is funny in a late role that also plays with this physical appearance and sexual orientation. Bresslaw is stuck in yet another 'black face' role – why he is always picked I don't know. The support cast are mostly black clichés but, even 25 years on the Lubi tribe look very, very sexy!

Overall this is pretty much par for the course for Carry On films and it will only really please fans. The broad humour lacks actual wit even if it is funny in a crude fashion but it is far from being consistently funny and it is fairly average as the series goes. Those in the mood for this type of humour will enjoy it but the humour is too broad and too badly structured to really be funny or witty.

This (surprisingly) consistently funny spoof of the Tarzan jungle epics from the "Carry On" gang is one of their better efforts I've watched so far: the rude, crude jokes come flying by with a welcome regularity and the old reliables - Sidney James (as boozing big game hunter Bill Boosey), Joan Sims (as an aristocratic lady who lost her husband and son in Africa many years earlier) and Charles Hawtrey (as the latter's husband who has spent his time in Africa lording it over a bevy of jungle girls) - enter gleefully into the spirit of the thing; the same goes for occasional participants in the series who join them here like Frankie Howerd (as the improbable leader of the expedition), Kenneth Connor (as a lecherous botanist) and Bernard Bresslaw (as the native guide).

Among the comic highlights are a snake sliding into Ms. Sims' undergarments at dinner-time (which she mistakes for the attentions of each of her male pretenders), the various bedtime romps which also involve Sims' son (the Tarzan figure) and a huge gorilla, James' shotgun 'standing up' at attention on seeing Sims taking a bath, Tarzan's various catastrophic attempts at leaping from one tree to another, his learning the English language and numeric system (which invariably stops at number 6, since he mistakes it for 'sex'), etc. The second half with Hawtrey sags slightly and the luscious Valerie Leon is not put to best advantage; amusingly, during this section, whenever our heroes are in peril, a classic musical cue from the 1960s "Spider-Man" animated series is heard on the soundtrack! All in all, as I said earlier, the result is generally engaging and quite enjoyable.