Three anthropology students, Robert, Rita and Tommy, venture into the uncharted regions of the Indonesian rain-forest where they are attacked, captured and tortured by a tribe of primitives.
My search for the most obscure of cannibal flicks continues, taking me deep into Indonesian exploitation territory with this trashy jungle adventure/survival horror from director Sisworo Gautama Putra. Although, strictly speaking, this doesn't really qualify as a cannibal film since no-one actually gets eaten, the movie is clearly modelled after the Italian cannibal 'classics' of the 1970s and serves up scene after scene that will seem all too familiar to fans of the genre.
During the course of the film, the captive students are stripped, humiliated and taunted, someone is impaled on a jungle booby trap, a woman gives birth in the jungle and has her newborn baby licked clean by children, a native is emasculated with a rock, and an assortment of animals are torn apart and eaten while still alive. However, with the exception of the sickening real-life animal cruelty, the film fails to match most of its Italian counterparts in terms of genuinely disturbing sequences, with a notable lack of graphic gore and gratuitous nudity (despite being grabbed, groped and almost raped, buxom Rita somehow remains clothed throughout).
Unintentional laughs, on the other hand, are never in short supply: the incongruous opening music is Kraftwerk's electronic classic 'The Robots'(!?!?!); Robert's distress at being ridden like a horse by the tribes-folk is absolutely hilarious; the 'language' spoken by the natives consists of comical grunts, shrieks and 'Ooooh's; a ridiculous rubber snake attack sees the victim being hoisted right up into a tree; an axe is thrown, only to return like a boomerang and strike down its owner; and a raft is constructed by the exhausted students in the space of thirty seconds.
