Les diamants du Kilimanjaro

Jess Franco makes exploitation films, and he has made tons of them. Franco is responsible for some of the most shocking films in cinema history, and god bless him for it. Unfortunately, The Diamonds of Kilominjaro is a truly awful movie that is not up to his usual standards.

Exploitation films should be judged on story, sex, and gore. What else is there? This film fails on most of those benchmarks. The plot is paper thin, placing a nubile young girl in the jungle among cannibals. We really don't get information on why she and her father were there in the first place. As expected, her father is the "Big White Chief" and she becomes a goddess, sitting in trees, naked. Add fortune hunters and precious stones, and you have your basic rescue the girl for greedy intentions plot line. The characters are stock, not adding an ounce of believability to the proceedings.

Gore? None, or at least very little. This film is often mentioned in the same vein as the classic Italian cannibal movies. Those seeking that type of gore need to run the other way. Save for one cheap be-heading, this movie features surprisingly little blood and guts.

As best I can tell the only reason this movie exists is so Katja Bienert, Aliene Mess, and Mari Carmen Neieto could run around naked. Actually "Lita" (Mari Carmen Neieto) does the full frontal heavy lifting, while the two jungle ladies are bare chested throughout. Yes, there are love scenes....probably the most sterile Franco has ever supervised. The women are beautiful, but nothing here to really make this movie an erotic classic either.

This movie just reeks of low budget buffoonery. The sets are laughable. The acting is horrid, and the editing is confusing. There is no real story to hold this together, and not enough of a budget (or effort) to shock or titillate. I think Franco fans have come to expect more out of the master of exploitation.

Franco films can be divided into 4 categories- the "earlies" (often black and white and inventive), the "naughties" (late 1960s/early 1970s often involving Soledad Miranda), the "nudies" (of various periods, but using full frontal female nudity as plot drive)and "the rest".

This is part of the "rest". It is not really a cannibal movie at all. It is certainly no gorefest. The few women in the picture dont even lose their loin cloths and there is little full frontal stuff at all. The picture quality on the German DVD I watched is poor. The film peters out (insofar as it ever catches fire). As a Franco fan, I would tell others not to bother. Do something else with your time...read a book....get a copy of "Women in Cellblock 9"...anything really...

Jesus Franco made many bad films, and some of the worst were the ones he did with the ultra-cheapskate French outfit Eurocine. This is probably the best of the a bad lot, but it IS a chance to see Franco regular Katja Beinert in a role that might actually be legal by US standards (some of his earlier films with her probably pushed even the much more liberal Continental European age-of-consent laws to the limit). I doubt this movie will appeal too much to the "barely legal" crowd though as Bienert seems to have sprung from the womb with a body that would put any 25-year-old woman to shame, and all she really does is wander around in nothing but a ridiculously low-riding loincloth for most of the film.

Biernert plays a female version of Tarzan who is adopted by a tribe of Africans along with her godfather after their plane crashes in the deep jungle. This tribe is so pathetic that they not only worship a teenage white girl as a goddess, but also make her drunken Scottish stereotype of a godfather their "Big White Chief". The one rebellious tribes-member meanwhile is about the same age as Beinert and looks like Lisa Bonet circa 1987. The "plot" begins when some mercenaries looking for the titular diamonds stumble across the barely-legal white jungle girl. They return with some of her relatives who are planning to kill her to get their hands on the inheritance of her sickly, dying mother (Lina Romay, in a highly unusual role given that it was the height of her hardcore porn career). It would have made a lot more sense to pay the mercenaries to just keep quiet, rather than to follow them into the jungle to kill the girl, but, oh well.

There is much less violence than the earlier Franco/Eurocine cannibal films. The only real sex scenes come courtesy of the luscious mistress (Maria Nieto) of one of Bienert's greedy relatives, who gets so turned on after being nearly eaten by stock footage of a crocodile while skinny-dipping that she drags one of the mercenaries (Anthony Mayans) into the weeds for some afternoon delight while Biernert's character curiously watches them. Mayans, playing the most out-of-shape mercenary in cinema history, later also takes a roll in the hay with the jungle girl but off-screen (probably a good thing as there are already WAY too many shots of his flabby ass in this movie).

This is not good by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a pretty harmless movie (aside from a couple sex scenes and National Geographic-style nudity, it could have gotten a PG rating in America). It has serviceable plot, occasional drama, and a setting that you can sometimes believe is NOT just a European zoo. And it's "Citizen Kane" compared to the other Franco film ("Golden Temple Amazons")it's paired up with in Shriek Show's new "Jungle Girls" box set.

African adventure in Jesús Franco style with very short budget, ordinary stars , being a colorful but inferior production. This exciting film contains thrills , an idiot romance, disconcerting characters , adventure and action scenes of infighting between violent tribes that generate little entertainment . A lighthearted romp about jungle adventures , concerning an expedition looking for a person who has presumably missing somewhere in African jungles . As a little girl is adopted by a tribe of Africans along with her godfather after their plane crashes in the deep jungle. But some of her relatives are scheming to murder her to get the valuable inheritance . Long time after , a bunch of adventurers head to a primitive tribe in Africa to find a treasure of diamonds and a white girl who was lost years ago and was made the tribe's goddess .

This Spanish/France co-production results to be a simple , plain and embarrising fun . Silly movie , containing inadequate action , thrills , worn-out cinematography , lush landscapes , brief nudism , anticlimatic score ; all meld together under Jess Frank 's failed direction . It is an unttractive and predictable adventure spectacle , ordinarily directed by the Spanish botcher filmmaker Jesus Franco . The plot is nothing more than a female version of the often-shot Tarzan story, but it lacks the curious mixture of glossiness and raw excitement that most Tarzan films have to offer. Instead, we're left with unconvincing sets and plenty of stock footage to pad out the predictable tale . As the production values are really cheap , you don't get to see Tarzana herself riding real elephants or fighting real jungle animals, just inappropriate insert stock footage. Here stands out the attractiveness of a very young Katja Bienert who spends the time of her screen appearance wearing nothing but a little junglekini thong bottom. She's badly accompanied by varios familar faces from Franco films , such as : Antonio Myans , Olivier Mathot , Mari Carmen Nieto , Daniel White : Franco's composer and of course Lina Romay. This El tesoro de la diosa blanca(1983) or Diamonds of Kilimandjaro (United States title) or The Treasure of the White Goddess results to be a late example of numerous topless jungle girl movies emanating from Europe in the late 1960s , 1970s, and 1980s this is par for the genre. It follows in the wake of the Sixties and Seventies sub-genre about semi-naked Tarzanas , when abounded this sort of films , such as : into Golden Goddess of Rio Beni (1964) by Eugenio Martin with Gillian Gills , Tarzana, the Wild Woman (1969) by Guido Malatesta with Femi Benussi or Daughter of the Jungle (1982) by Umberto Lenzi with Sabrina Siani.

Produced by Daniel Lesoeur , Marius Lesoeur from Eurociné and Manacoa Productions , Jesús Franco's owner , the latter directs this off-the-wall jungle/adventure in his usual bungling style . The motion picture was lousily written, edited, produced and directed by Jesús, Jess, Franco. Jess was a Stajanovist, restless writer, producer, director who realized over 200 pictures. His career spans over 50 years with a few successes and lots of flops, making all kind of genres : thrillers, adventures, action and with penchant for Terror and erotic genre . Jesus used to sigb under pseudonym, among the aliases he used apart from Jess Frank or Franco Manera, were the following ones : Frank Hollman, Clifford Brown, David Khune, James P. Johnson, David Though, among others. Franco used to use ordinary trademarks, such as : zooms , nudism, foreground on objects , filmmaking in DIY style and managing to work extraordinarily quick in very low budget, as well as frequently releasing various titles at the same time. He was a prolific filmmaker, directing a lot of lousy movies. However, making some acceptable films , such as : We are 18 years old, The awful Dr Orloff, The Bloody Judge , Count Dracula, 99 women, The Blood of Fumanchu, Faceless and a few others. And many of them were heavily cut and with double versions. Rating Viaje a Bangkok : 3/10 . Inferior and below adventures action movie. Only for Jess Frank completists.

A group of adventurers travel to the 'dark continent' to try and locate a lost heiress named Diana, who disappeared years before in a plane crash, and who is now believed to be living with a savage tribe that consider her to be their goddess.

Once again, my search for sleazy, European cannibal movies has taken me deep into Jess Franco territory—a seemingly endless cinematic wilderness swarming with sub-par scriptwriting, crawling with crap camera-work, and abundant with awful acting (Franco regular Lina Romay taking the prize this time for her pitiful performance as an ailing, elderly woman). It is here, in this hellish place, that I finally stumbled upon Diamonds of Kilimanjaro, an abysmal jungle-based exploitationer so stupefyingly bad that it took me three successive evenings to finish watching it.

Tawdry and unrelentingly dull, even by Franco's standards, this wearisome piece of trash fails on almost every level: the story is a dreadfully dull derivative of Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan, albeit with a feminine twist; the film appears to have been filmed in the local botanical gardens, although grainy stock footage is poorly integrated into the film in a pointless effort to convince viewers that the action is really taking place in Africa; and the death scenes are virtually bloodless (Franco can usually be relied upon for some splatter, but despite initial appearances, this isn't a cannibal movie and it isn't that gory).

Where the director does succeed, however, is in his casting of sexy young Katja Bienert as jungle jail-bait Diana. Running and leaping through the undergrowth in nothing but a skimpy loin-cloth, her curvaceous bod belying the fact that she was only sixteen at the time, this nubile beauty makes quite an impression. Franco also throws in some further nudity courtesy of Mari Carmen Nieto as treacherous traveller Lita (who gives us a glimpse of her untamed regions), and Aline Mess as topless warrior woman Noba, thus narrowly avoiding getting yet another rating of 1/10 from me (although I'm sure he'll be receiving plenty more in the future—I have loads of his films yet to see).