Terror in the Jungle (1968)

A truly terrible movie - amateurishly made with bargain basement special effects, non-professional actors, negligible production values and atrocious dialogue - Terror in the Jungle (1968) is nonetheless quite fascinating, with an oddly structured plot and a final lurch into apparent fantasy.   That the movie feels like three shorter, linked, films roughly bundled together shouldn't be surprising, as that is, in essence, what it is, with three different directors credited.  The original director, Tom De Simone, has actually written on IMDB about his involvement in the production.  He apparently shot the opening third of the film, which features various characters boarding a DC3 airliner to fly from the US to Peru.  At this point, it seems to be shaping up to be some kind of disaster movie, as we learn the backgrounds of the various passengers, who fulfil all the usual stereotypes for this sort of movie:  an exotic dancer heading South to appear in a film, the wealthy guy she hooks up with, a woman just acquitted of the murder of her husband, a pair of nuns accompanying the coffin of a dead colleague and an unaccompanied young boy going to see his mother.  So, it's no surprise when the plane runs into trouble during a storm, while flying over the jungle.  Panic ensues, one of the nuns jumps out in act of self-sacrifice in order to lighten the load, the possibly murderous widow gets hysterical and her husband's money falls out of her bag and so on.  Of course, the plane then crashes into a river and an heroic stewardess manages to get the surviving passengers and crew off.  But those in the audience expecting a jungle survival drama are immediately frustrated, with the passengers in the river being eaten by crocodiles and the stewardess and captain perishing as the burning plane explodes.  Only the little boy, who has been placed in the dead nun's now empty casket, survives and floats away down the river!

The sudden demise of most of the characters was dictated by the fact that, according to De Simone, the film was running over budget and location filming in Peru yet to start.  At this point he departed the film and the producer found another director to supervise the Peruvian shooting.  Most of this comprises the young boy wandering around the jungle, crying and snivelling, (which might well be a realistic reaction for a child of that age in such a situation, but is nonetheless extremely irritating and leaves you hoping that those crocodiles might come back and eat him), while his father tries to organise a rescue expedition.  The boy is found by a local tribe, who declare him to be the son of their god.  A government search team in a float plane find evidence that the boy is still alive, but one falls foul of a poison dart.  Eventually, the father secures help from a couple of missionaries who accompany him into the jungle.  All of this location shooting is heavily padded out with lots of  stock footage of wildlife.  Still feeling that something more was needed, the producer decided to add in a new sub-plot involving the natives' temple and some kind of conflict between rival factions, one wanting to sacrifice the boy, not believing in his divine status, the other trying to protect him.  As the Peruvian shooting had ended, a temple set was built in Griffith Park in LA and a third director supervised lots of extras dressed as natives running around and fighting each other.  This section gets quite bloody, with a number of graphic stabbings, with close ups of knives being thrust into bare torsos.  It also, at its climax, turns to the fantastic.  As the chief bad guy native is about to stab the boy, having chased him back into the jungle, the child's toy tiger he has dropped, inexplicably turns into a real leopard and kills the native.  Which is problematic on multiple levels, not least the question of why a toy tiger would turn into a real leopard (a completely different species), particularly as leopards aren't native to South America - it should surely have been a jaguar.  Even if we accept the scene at face value, with its implication that the boy really is divine, it is so ineptly filmed that it simply raises laughs - it is painfully obvious that, in the close ups, the man is wrestling with a glassy eyed stuffed leopard, while the real animal is clearly tethered by a very visible leash.

After this, the boys runs away, straight into the arms of his father who turns out to be conveniently nearby.  The father dismisses the kid's story about the leopard as fantasy.  As well he might, as he was in Peru while it was happening in Griffith Park.  Indeed, it is painfully obvious that the temple sequences were shot on a completely different location, with the park proving a poor match with the real jungle.  overall, the film leaves the viewer feeling utterly bewildered as to exactly why anyone would ever have wanted to make it, let alone release it.  But you can't help but admire the way in which this patchwork quilt of footage has been cobbled together so as to resemble some approximation of a feature film.  There's no denying that the sudden narrative shift, with most of the cast who have just been built up as major characters, are abruptly obliterated, is, on first viewing, quite breathtaking, a bold choice which completely throws the audience expectations to the kerb, you might even think.  Unfortunately, its failure to follow it up with anything resembling a coherent story, or to provide strong new characters, (the father and those priests are about as interesting as house bricks, while the natives are a bunch of wildly overacted stereotypes), sinks audience expectations completely.  The first third of the film actually isn't that bad - it isn't great, to be sure, but, bad acting and dialogue notwithstanding, it's reasonably competent for a low budget film,  The rest, however, is woeful.  The stumbling, episodic nature of the film, along with the lack of any sympathetic character for the audience focus on, means that there is no suspense, no tension and no sense of peril.   Yet, Terror in the Jungle isn't quite the chore to sit through that many bad movies are - there is enough about it that is utterly bizarre and out of left field, that it keeps you watching.