Tommy Snöberg Söderberg 
The Term has ended for Catherine Miles (Elvire Audray), who attends boarding school in London. She heads home to spend the summer with her parents at their ranch in the Amazon jungle. During a boat trip on the river, near large unexplored areas of the jungle, they are attacked and her parents are killed. Headhunters take their heads as trophies and take Catherine prisoner to their village deep in the jungle. She is now forced to adopt their customs and, with the help of the warrior Umukai (Will Gonzales), who has fallen in love with her, she manages to survive. As the shock gradually wears off, and the more she truly realizes that Umukai really loves her and has a noble heart, her mind becomes increasingly occupied with escape. When she also learns that everything is not as it seems regarding her parents’ deaths, her instinct for revenge takes over completely.
True Story?
This film immediately claims to tell a true story and that what we are about to see are reconstructed events from Catherine Miles’s trial. They even go so far as to have the camera film an alleged interview with the real Catherine Miles by the Thames, as she is supposedly now living in London. It’s an effective device, and combined with trial scenes throughout the film, the story is told in a very documentary-like manner.
Perhaps that’s also why they tried to capitalize on the success of Cannibal Holocaust by presenting the film as a sequel to that hit. The two have nothing to do with each other, however.
If you’re also looking for a straightforward cannibal movie, you’ve come to the wrong place. The film contains no actual cannibalism whatsoever, and the only reference to such activities is one of the rival tribes in the area. What it does contain in fairly generous amounts, however, is well-executed gore and quite a lot of bare breasts as well! I suppose that comes with the territory of the genre, and, hand on heart, it would probably look rather ridiculous if the natives were running around wearing too many clothes. But the makeup effects are skillfully done, as I said, and on the few occasions when the budget or talent wasn’t quite enough, they solve the problem with clever camera tricks so that it looks good anyway!
More than gore
But this is a film that has more than just superficial gore effects to feast on. The relationships between the characters are interesting, and as usual, the “savage” is portrayed as more sophisticated than the “civilized” white man. It’s also a film with beautiful nature photography, both beautiful and unusual environments and scenes where, for example, a leopard catches a small monkey to feast on—all in the service of the documentary feel and realism.
Definitely one of the best jungle movies I’ve seen, and definitely one I recommend to anyone who’s interested in this kind of thing!
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