Eaten Alive aka The Emerald JungleDirector: Umberto LenziGenre: Horror Publisher: Medusa Produzione Released: MPAA Rating: Unrated Cast: Robert Kerman, Ivan Rassimov, Me Me Lai |
A Review by Mike Bracken
02/24/2002
’These people don't buy frozen meat from a supermarket like us, they get it fresh everyday from folk like you or me.’--Mel Ferrer, describing cannibals.
Ever wonder what would happen if you crossed the typical Italian cannibal flick with the made for television Jim Jones bio-pic Guyana Tragedy? Well, wonder no more, because one of Italy’s greatest rip-off artists, the prolific Umberto Lenzi (Cannibal Ferox, City of the Walking Dead) has made Eaten Alive aka The Emerald Jungle, a film that answers that very question.
The film opens with some really groovy disco music followed by several scenes of a Polynesian assassin killing white guys in major cities—with a blowgun! After taking out a target in NYC, our assassin finds himself on the wrong end of a human/truck encounter, and promptly dies. The police discover that he’s using poison darts dipped in cobra venom—and that he’s conveniently carrying a strip of film. The film shows some weird fertility rite with guys getting strung up by hooks. Unsure as to what the film is, the cops pass it on to Mel Ferrer’s character (Ferrer’s clearly here just to make a few bucks, just like his role in Lenzi’s City of the Walking Dead) who in turn shows it to Sheila Morris (Janet Agren: The Gates of Hell). Morris views the film and spots her missing sister in the middle of the action (man, talk about strokes of luck…).
It seems that some nutjob named Jonas (Ivan Rassimov: Ultimo Mondo Cannibale) has started a cult called the Purification Sect (basically just think of the Amish, then add more sex and nudity). Jonas (notice the similarity to Jones—Lenzi gives us no credit…) has loaded up his followers (including Morris’ sister, Diana, played by Paola Senatore) and taken them to the wilds of New Guinea to start a utopian society. Sheila, ever the dutiful sister, decides that she must go and rescue her wayward sibling, so she recruits rogue adventurer Mark (cannibal film regular Robert Kerman, who went on to a fairly large career in the porn industry where he worked under the name R. Bolla) to guide her through the jungle.
However, they’re soon lost—and surrounded by a tribe of stone-age cannibals who still think eating human flesh is a good thing—until they stumble upon Jonas’ jungle retreat. They infiltrate the sect, find Sheila’s sister (who realizes it was a mistake to follow Jonas) and meet up with a local woman named Mowara (Me Me Lai: Ultimo Mondo Cannibale) who also wants to escape, and make a run for it—contending with both Jonas’ overzealous followers and the flesh craving cannibals of the jungle. Who will survive, and what will be left of them? (sorry, I get a little carried away sometimes…)
Reading the plot synopsis, the story for Eaten Alive sounds pretty darn good. We’ve got cannibals, we’ve got gore, we’ve got violence, we’ve got an insane man with a messiah complex, and we’ve got lots of nudity—all the core exploitation film elements are present and accounted for and a few other elements are thrown into the mix for good measure. So, where does this film go so horribly wrong? Just about everywhere.
Lenzi pretty much launched the entire cannibal film cycle in Italy with his 1972 film Man From Deep River. By the mid to late 1970’s, the cycle was reaching high gear, with seminal contributions from directors like Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust) and Lenzi’s own ultra-sleazy Cannibal Ferox, as well as hybrid films from men like Joe D’Amato (Trap Them and Kill Them, which put erotic film character Emmanuelle into direct confrontation with cannibals) and Marino Girolami’s Zombi Holocaust, which combined zombies and cannibals in one movie. In short, cannibals were all the rage in Italian cinema (which makes sense, when one considers that a mere decade before the Italians were enthralled with the idea of making mondo documentaries—often set in third world jungles).
The Italians have never been known for their originality. Almost every major film craze in Italy is inspired by either a successful film made by another Italian director (e.g. the gialli craze after Argento’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage) or the success of a foreign film (e.g. the zombie film craze inspired by the success of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead or the spate of Mad Max clones). Numerous Italian films have liberally ‘borrowed’ footage from other movies (generally jungle footage from the mondo documentaries whenever filming scenes in an actual jungle would put a strain on the budget). However, Lenzi basically commits grand theft cinema here by stealing sequences from other cannibal films for inclusion here.
Truth be told, there’s very little original gore footage in this movie—Lenzi simply rips it off from other (better) cannibal films and uses it as his own. And I don’t mean that he simply borrows the idea and re-shoots it—I mean he literally snips the footage out of another director’s film and splices it into his. In this movie, Lenzi borrows the castration scene and what appears to be the alligator attack sequence from Sergio Martino’s Mountain of the Cannibal God, a disemboweling scene from Deodato’s Ultimo Mondo Cannibale, animal slaughter scenes from what appears to be several different mondo documentaries, and he even re-uses footage from his own film, Man From Deep River…somebody call the cops. Of course, if you’re a cannibal flick neophyte, you probably wouldn’t notice any of this—but to the hardcore fan, this is unforgivable.
But, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Lenzi wrote the script for Eaten Alive and it plays out like something scribbled on napkins after a night of binge drinking. The dialogue is frequently laugh out loud corny, with characters giving giant chunks of needless exposition through verbal exchanges with other characters or just uttering stupid lines (like Mel Ferrer’s classic explanation of cannibals: ‘These people don't buy frozen meat from a supermarket like us, they get it fresh everyday from folk like you or me.’) Weird plot contrivances abound, and whenever Lenzi needs something to get the story from one place to another, you can bet that some implausible ‘clue’ will turn up in the scene for our heroine to discover. All in all, it’s completely inept—but it’s inept in a way that’s sort of fun to watch. This is prime Mystery Science Theater 3000 material.
The performances are equally lame, particularly those from Paola Senatore and Janet Agren. Both characters have these really awful dubbed in voices with thick southern accents—imagine Scarlett O’Hara surrounded by flesh eating savages and you’ll get the idea. Of course, neither of them gets to do much besides get naked, scream, and get in Robert Kerman’s way for most of the film, but they even manage to mess that up. Agren can’t even play drugged convincingly.
Kerman, Rassimov, and even Me Me Lai (who really doesn’t get much screentime) are all better than the aforementioned actresses. Rassimov plays Jonas with a real sense of camp, but it actually adds to the mood overall. No one’s taking this film seriously, so Rassimov’s scenery chewing adds to the fun. I particularly love the fact that he feels the need to play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (aka the Phantom of the Opera music) when he speaks to his followers. Kerman is just Kerman—a gruff adventurer trapped in the jungle (again) and surrounded by cannibals (again). It’s a stereotypical role, but Kerman makes the most of it—and the film’s better because of it.
What little gore Lenzi did shoot on his own is pretty laughable in the execution. For example, when the cannibals capture two women, they start carving them up and eating them right on the spot. Lenzi starts us off well, with a scene of a knife carving off a breast, but later, he cuts to a long shot of one of the victims with her foot and hand hacked off. Unfortunately, the actress has blood smeared on her wrist and calf while the rest of the foot and hand is simply buried beneath the surface of some very odd looking topsoil. Essentially, it’s the same effect you could make by burying your foot in the sand at the beach. The rest of the gore is ok, but of course, most of it’s lifted from other films—so it’s hard to recommend it.
Finally, there are numerous other gaffes throughout the movie that kill the mood completely. In one scene, the dubbing is messed up so that a character says ‘it’s gonna be one helluva one helluva fancy trick to pull them out of there.’ In another segment, Kerman grabs a spear from a native and tosses it toward the ground—Lenzi then cuts to a scene where the spear slams into a native’s stomach, killing him…huh? At any rate, there are even more moments like this throughout the film—keep your eyes peeled and you’re sure to spot them.
And last but not least, a few words on the various versions of this film. Eaten Alive (or Mangiati Vivi) is the uncut version of this film. Emerald Jungle (not to be confused with Boorman’s Emerald Forest) is the more widely available and slightly cut version. Normally, I’d say to track down the uncut version—but I wouldn’t waste too much effort on such a lame movie.
Eaten Alive is perhaps the worst film in the entire Italian cannibal cycle, which is disappointing, because the melding of the typical cannibal film plot with the ‘Jim Jones’ angle sounds quite promising—and perhaps in the hands of another director, this film might have been a classic. But, this is an Umberto Lenzi film—which guarantees that it’ll be a low-budget attempt to cash in on the popularity of the cycle and that it won’t be concerned with being a quality film. Lenzi would redeem himself with Cannibal Ferox, a film that’s superior to this one in almost every way. Still, even despite the major flaws, Eaten Alive is good in a campy sort of way. The problems with the dialogue, the editing—even the scene theft—left me cracking up for much of the 90+ minute running time. Still, that’s not enough to recommend this flick. Eaten Alive isn’t as bad as Lenzi’s City of the Walking Dead, but it’s close.
© Copyright CultureCartel.com 02/24/2002
