Jungle Heat (1957)I have a thing for old B-movies. It's partly for the rawness, and the photography, and maybe discovering some actors in early (or late) performances.
Rates a good average score of 5. A fairly routine good guys vs bad guys plot, set in a rarely used location (Hawaii) at the time.
It must be 20 years ago, when I first watched (most of) this movie with a friend. It left a deep impression on me, and I had to tell everybody in school about the wild torture scenes in this film...
The gags are too wide spaced in this slapstick two reeler set in Africa, where St. John encounters stop motion animated elephants, which (at least in the muddy copy) are indistinguishable from the real one they use.
A Bel Air production, it's not so usual to catch on a TV broadcast. So, don't let it go.
The flimsy premise for this is the decline of US interest in the Vietnam war, a kind of Dirty Dozen set-up, and a wandering moustache.Sam Jones, whoever he is, is summoned by a chronically bad actor to summon another guy called Nguyen to train up a load of vietnamese guys to transport stuff from somewhere to somewhere else.
Flash Gordon himself, Sam Jones appears in this Hong Kong produced Vietnam war flick as an affable sort of army drill sergeant given the task of breaking in a group of local Vietnamese recruits. The trouble is, he is not allowed to reveal to them the full extent and danger of their future task at hand.
JUNGLE HEAT is one of the many jungle war flicks that littered video shelves in the mid '80s; this was the era of Rambo, of an endless stream of Filipino cheapies, of Italian director Antonio Margheriti and his obsession with the genre. I love the movies, I love the jungle backdrops, but even I can accept when a film is bad, and JUNGLE HEAT is certainly a bad film.
"Jungle Heat" is an extremely violent but pretty retarded exploitation film, supposedly set during the final months of the war in Vietnam. The American army commanders haven't got many motivated heroes left so they're training local soldiers to fight against the dangerous Vietcong.
