Welcome to the Jungle

Okay, I rented this because I got my crush on all the 80's cannibal and zombie flicks. It's always nice to have some movie to switch off your brain and enjoy people being eaten, may the acting be bad and the plot be worse.

So, what have we got? Two hot chicks? Check. The crazy dude? Check. The cool dude? Check. Deserted Island? Check. Stupid plot? Check. Stupid dialogs? Check. Cool shots of the landscape? Check. A very gory scene right at the beginning? Well... No. Random gratuitous breast shots? No. Overuse of gore? No.

What the hell is this supposed to be? A few skulls placed on rocks and some people with white paint in the face don't make no cannibal movie. There's no suspense, no gore, no humor, no nudity, and no plot whatsoever. And it doesn't have a message in some political way or something like that. It's a movie who just doesn't get going, and once it does, it's over.

The acting is pretty decent, and the camera work is very nice at times. But that's about it. If you wanna see a REAL cannibal movie, go get "Cannibal Holocaust" or one of the early 80s movies the Italians did. They are indeed BAD, but, hey... At least they're gory!

I thought this movie was gonna be good.It starts out at least looking a bit promising but then just when it finally gets to some good stuff it ends leaving you feeling unsatisfied and kind of mad.And let me add that this movie has absolutely nothing to do with Guns N Roses.

2 couples set out to find the missing Michael Rockefeller ,who disappeared into the jungles of New Guinea in 1961 and was never heard from again.A rumor from a bush pilot sends the four out into the jungle to find Rockefeller and get rich and famous doing it.After one of the four steals some bones from a burial site the local natives get ticked off.But they might have anyway,who knows? This movie has nothing original to offer.We've seen the cannibal movies before and we've seen the shaky hand held movie documentary style filming before.My question with these supposed self shot movies is would a person really keep filming even after they realize their life is in danger ?Really? You gonna keep the camera light on out in the middle of the jungle at night with headhunters all around?I kinda think I'm gonna shut it off and hide like the sniveling coward I am.

Anyway the movie goes along fine and then all of a sudden it's sort of wraps up all quick like and the credits roll.Did you boys run out of money or did you get tired of filming out in the hot jungle?It just abruptly quits before any good gore or terror gets going.

Some night time quick glimpses of some gore is about it.No nudity at all even though you got 4 hot young folks out in the middle of nowhere taking swims and sunbathing and stuff like that.

I can't recommend this movie ,it just never delivers on it's promise of terror and gore.

"Welcome to the Jungle" has nothing to do with the Guns N' Roses song of the same name, but it owes a lot to "The Blair Witch Project." Too bad it has none of the latter's suspense or creativity.

The plot, such as it is, involves two young couples armed with video cameras who set off into the New Guinea jungle to find Michael Rockefeller, heir to the wealthy family, who disappeared on an expedition there in 1961. Reports are that Rockefeller encountered cannibals, and there's no need to post a spoiler here because the developments of this film are pretty obvious from the start. Unfortunately, before those developments actually develop, we are subject to an hour of improvised whining while the four adventurers wander the jungle, oblivious to the danger that the viewer knows awaits them.

The acting is average, the dialogue is banal, and the hand-held camera is a chore to endure. The film lacks scenes of torture — all of it happens off-camera, ironically — but the images of carnage are as gratuitous as you'd expect from Dimension Extreme. It's hard to feel any sympathy for these self-involved tourists once they've made it clear they'd never be welcome at our dinner table.

The only thing "Welcome to the Jungle" has going for it is some impressive photography. Unfortunately, the dessert doesn't justify the main course.

Welcome To The Jungle is a taut, well made, well acted shock 'mockumentary' that might have been considered a groundbreaking classic of exploitation cinema, if it hadn't been for the fact that not one second of it is in any way original. The pace and directorial style is stolen from The Blair Witch Project, whilst the nihilistic plot and certain visuals are taken from the film that inspired Blair Witch, Ruggero Deodato's infamous Cannibal Holocaust. It is hard to admire something that so shamelessly rips off other genre classics, no matter how well put together it is.

Writer/director Jonathan Hensleigh's extremely derivative plot sees two couples (a pair of hedonists, and their more sensible friends) travel to a cannibal infested jungle to try and find the heir to the Rockefeller fortune, who went missing in the area over 40 years earlier. As the going gets tough, tempers become frayed and arguments inevitably break out. But things really go tits up when one of the group angers the locals by pilfering a skull from a native burial site. The extremely miffed gut-munchers stalk the amateur adventurers and teach them not to go messing with their ancestors' remains.

What follows is undeniably tense, occasionally quite nasty, and technically well handled by cast and crew, but I fail to see how the makers of Welcome To The Jungle expected to present this film without criticism. Perhaps, if it had been as unrelentingly harrowing as Cannibal Holocaust (is that even possible?), fans of extreme horror would have forgiven the plagiarism and admired the film's willingness to shock and disgust. But instead, even the nastiest moment in Hensleigh's film, in which one of the victims is shown impaled on a bamboo pole, is a weak copy of a much more disturbing image in Deodato's movie.

Horror fans who have yet to experience the 'delights' of Cannibal Holocaust or the effectively creepy atmosphere of Blair Witch will probably find much to enjoy about Welcome to the Jungle. However, the rest of us will be annoyed by the bare-faced cheek of its makers. To give it a rating any higher than 5/10 just seems wrong.

The premise was interesting, a search for Michael Rockefeller who disappeared in the jungles of New Guinea in 1961. Tying a story, especially a horror story, to an actual historic event intrigues me. Like adding Ambrose Bierce to Dusk til Dawn (3) or Edgar Allan Poe to any number of films it adds an extra dimension to the whole spirit of suspension of disbelief; and then to add cannibals to the mix without taking them out of their natural element is like icing on the cake.

Then it falls apart. When is this "found camera" fad going to go away. It is a filming technique that worked once, 40 years ago in Cannibal Holocaust, but has fallen on hard times. After a while the shaky camera thing gets irritating. And when you add in the Blair Witch stylings; the whiny, bitchy filmmakers who are more interested in themselves than the thing they are documenting, then things go from bad to worse.

Too much of the dialogue and storyline seemed improvised. Rather than adding character depth or an interesting plot development, it only took 1 dimensional characters and made them even more uninteresting and unlikeable.

Some of the cinematography was good, though some was too dark (intentional perhaps but grating non the less), and there were some beautiful location shots. The impaled "girl on a stick" scene, lifted from Cannibal Holocaust, was impressive. Okay, that is pretty much the extent of it's finer points.

As to the aforementioned suspension of disbelieve, it requires an involvement in the story to work, and that wasn't present. These weren't professional documentary filmmakers with a "get the shot no matter what" mentality. They were spoiled 20 something or others who would have dropped the camera and run for their lives at the first sign of danger. The danger that came, by the way, in the last 30 minutes or so. Up until then it was all the kind of self indulgence that one would expect from from these two particular couples taking videos of their journey. In other words, trite nonsense that has nothing to do with either the documentation of the search nor true progression of the story.

They did keep it fairly realistic in that they didn't show what the cameras would not have shown. Bodies dragged out of view of the lens, killings happening out of sight, etc. Unfortunately that meant that most of the really good scenes occurred off camera. So, realistic yes, boring, double yes. In other words, show me the blood and gore. In low budget horror filmmaking when you are working without tension, acting, or reason, then you have to make up for it with some added gore and a little T & A. Consider that my gratuitous gratuity to the genre.

If you have to continue in the "found camera" vein then do it with a new twist. Maybe a filmmaker who finds the footage and then attempts to recreate it in his or her own film with perhaps horrifying repercussions. Then we can use a few bouncing camera shots and then move on to some decent filmmaking.

I love low budget horror. I even love bad low budget horror. But when I see a film that actually had potential, let down by poor execution by people who should know better, I feel nothing but regret.