Jungle Warriors

A group of fashion models travel with their producer Larry (Marjoe Gortner) and pilot/guide Ben (Kai Wulff) to a South American jungle for a photo assignment. What could possibly go wrong?

Jungle Warriors is worth seeing for any self-respecting fan of crap B-movies if only for its horrible theme song, which has to be the most tuneless bit of warbling ever to grace a movie. The woman responsible for this insult to music lovers everywhere is Italian singer Marina Arcangeli: I'm guessing that her surname translates as Archangel, but let me assure you that there's nothing angelic about her voice, which is pure audible evil, sucking at the soul with every screeching syllable.

Abysmal title song aside, this film is a fairly routine piece of cheesy 80s European action with a predictably dumb plot: the models are captured by a gang of ruthless drug runners who occupy a nearby Spanish fortress and, after their male companions are killed (Larry is caught in a booby trap, Ben has his head hacked off), they are left at the mercy of the despicable baddies, who rape and torture them. Escape is, of course, inevitable, but how many of them will make it out of the jungle alive?

This nonsense is made slightly more bearable thanks to a solid cast that includes seasoned genre regulars Paul L. Smith, John Vernon, Woody Strode, and Sybil Danning. Beware, however, of the severely edited R2 version of the film: the copy that I saw had clearly suffered at the scissors of the censors, the more extreme moments shorn of gore and nudity, making the experience rather frustrating for exploitation fans such as myself.

5/10 (although it might possibly be worth a 6 with the juicier stuff intact).