10 February 2008

Jungle Warriors

Jungle Warriors
a.ka. Euer Weg fuhrt durch die Holle
Germany - 1984
Director- Ernst R. von Theumer
Media Home Entertainment, 1985, VHS

What a whole load of good vibes I got off this movie. Sybill Danning is in it, and I saw a photo-still of her holding an assault rifle and standing with a bunch of girls in bikinis. "This son-of-a-bitch has got to be really good," I thought. I read that it was directed by a German guy, and originally went by a German title, cool, I like German sensibility. Fuggin' guns and drugs 'n' girls in small clothing, what could be better, right?
It opens with a short battle scene involving Woody Strode in a beret and sporting a small children's bow and arrow. Lethal in jump cuts at all ranges, Strode and Co. kill all other people in the scene, whoever they're supposed to be.

A fat white guy, John Vernon (Chained Heat and tons of other crap) is a sleazy, cocky American drug dealer who heads down to fictional cartel country to cut a huge deal with an even fatter white guy (posing as a brown guy). In the meantime blonde jerky-stick (Marjoe Gortner of Starcrash) is dragging his squad of supermodels down to South America for an exotic photo shoot. Get it? Massive narcotics deal, plus massive sex appeal equals action movie! With hot chicks! And no action!


This turns so quickly into a talkie that it's hard to really shake the first couple of scenes from your mind. Wait, Marjoe just got impaled on a jungle trap, are you really going to attempt to develop the shallow ridiculous plot for the next hour? I was made sad by so much of the repeated foundering at intrigue this attempted that, with the CIA ops and cartel and fat white dudes, it completely lost me.
John Vernon and Sybil Danning are both remarkably disappointing in the wake of Panther Squad, and Chained Heat, some of my recent favorites. All in all, this flick is punctuated by a few moments of effectively repugnant behavior and a more or less awesome soundtrack (except for a scene of 80's pop pap). And as excitingly gross (no really) as that is, the movie never seems ready to admit that that's it's purpose. If only we could admit that sometimes all we wanted was big boobs and bloodsplosion medicine. Then maybe we wouldn't get tricked into gagging repeatedly on this completely inedible spoon called "plot".




Some DVD covers from Europe and Japan, poor suckers.A crappy French poster:Compare the Jungle Warriors video box at the top, with the box art from Future Hunters, I think they're the same artist!

1 comment:

Regis said...

What're you talking about, that French poster is awesome: those women are symbolically larger than the jungle AND that helicopter.