Amazonia: The Catherine Miles Story (1985)

White Slave starts off looking like it's going to be a really lame pastiche of Cannibal Holocaust, what with an opening montage of the Amazon set to ho-hum music imitating Riz Ortolani's famous score for that other film. And actually it stays lame for a fair while - but then it gets good! Amazon headhunters ambush the boat of some well-to-do white landowners and their daughter, who's back fresh from studying in London. They remove the heads of the parents and drag the daughter back to their village, where gradually (and after much gnashing of teeth by all concerned) she's absorbed into their tribal lifestyle - which never seems to involve any more headhunting for the rest of the film, but don't dwell on that.The film makes sure to include a little bit from all of the major food groups of this horror subgenre: gore, hazardous jungle treks, badly graded stock footage of wildlife, animals stupidly killing each other for real, tribal warfare, cruel and probably entirely fictitious tribal customs and punishments meted out left, right and centre, and plenty of nudity. Interestingly, there's no cannibalism at all. While the first third of the film really seems to be going through the motions with these things, there's a whole bunch of plot from then onwards and dare I say a good degree of human warmth. Once Catherine is fully ensconced in the tribe, she deals with character rivalries, tribal customs and conflicting loyalties and emotions. There's some honour and romance at stake, plus a minor mystery to be dealt with and revenge to be had. White Slave mobilises from being an extremely by-the-numbers exploitation film to one with an involving story and human qualities you can get into. You still have to put up with one of the silliest court trials in the world (it's used as a framing device), but overall, I found this film to be a pleasant surprise.

Being a "connoisseur" of bad and tasteless cinema, I didn't really track this flick down, but more or less stumbled upon it at Best Buy. Well, what do you expect from a review on the front that says "The blood flows freely, and the clothes drop often." SHAZAM! Now, I am seasoned enough to know that usually when you see tags like that, the exact opposite happens. Not so in this case. I am not even going to bother with the story line, as that has been discussed already. Instead, let's focus on the exploitation factors. Nudity? Loads of it. The lead actress is pretty much nekkid for 3/4 of the film. This distracts from an otherwise horrid acting performance, but hey, we're not looking for Oscar nominees with titles like "White Slave", are we? Blood and violence? Oh yes, we have that as well, and some of it is actually pretty decent! Let's see: Decapitations- check. Blow darting- check. Gratuitous acts of animal violence (a tiger jumping up and nailing this little monkey is pretty sweet)- check. We also have random club beatings, and people hung upside down to be eaten alive by insects. Yeah, this was definitely a good way to knock off an hour and a half of my life. Anyway, if you're looking for another Cannibal Holocaust, forget it. This is just a guilty pleasure, with no scars left behind (unlike Cannibal Holocaust), and one worth checking out. I give it 7 out of 10 for more boobies than you can shake a stick at.

This Italian film with once again more alternative titles than actual dialogue is a mid-80's exploitation attempt by enthusiast director Mario Gariazzo, who obviously was deeply impressed by the work of his fellow Italian filmmakers Rugero Deodato and Umberto Lenzi. It's a supposedly true story (yeah…sure) about an 18-year-old girl who visits her parents' plantation in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Shortly after her arrival, her parents are brutally murdered and beheaded during a boat ride. The poor cutie is taken prisoner by a savage and primitive tribe. During two years, she's has to take part in traditional and barbaric rites of this tribe. She's sold to the richest man in town (price = one goat and a chicken), has to work and, eventually, she escapes with the head warrior she has fallen in love with. Now, 'Amazonia' isn't a bad little flick but it tries to be so much bigger than it actually is. The entire production seems to shout out: 'Look, we're as good as Cannibal Holocaust!!!' The opening sequences, in which the beautiful jungle is shown guided by a great score, is an exact copy of Deodato's film and throughout the whole film, the same documentary style is used. The film could have done without these pretentious aspects. At his best, Amazonia is like a fairly reasonable crossover between Cannibal Holocaust and Umberto Lenzi's 'Deep River Savages' (in which an Englishman spends years among a primitive tribe in New-Guinea). It's not nearly as memorable as the majority of Italian sleaze classics and that's merely due to the atrocious acting of Elvire Audrey. There's some great gore and terrific authentic sleaze to enjoy, though.

This is basically another one of those cannibal/jungle movies. It's true this movie is nothing but gore and nudity, but that's all you should be expecting from this kind of movie.A young girls parents are killed and decapitated (in a fairly gory scene) and she is taken prisoner by a group of headhunters. They strip her and trade her as a slave, so she spends the rest of the movie running through the jungle naked. Unlike a lot of these kinds of movies it actually does have a plot and it's supposedly 'based on a true story'. Definately worth a rental.If you use words like "atrocious banal" then you probably will not like this movie.