24 Most Dangerous Movie Jungles
Inspired by The Green Inferno, this week’s 24 Frames treks deep into some of the most dangerous and deadly jungle settings ever captured on film.
Year: 2015
Eli Roth’s first film since 2007’s Hostel sequel sees the horror director sending more pretty young things into grisly scenarios abroad. This time, it’s student activists travelling to save the Amazon rainforest who get captured by indigenous cannibals.
Year: 1980
Tomatometer: 65%
Green Inferno draws from the grindhouse tradition of jungle cannibal movies, which saw a boom in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The best and brightest of this lovely bunch is Cannibal Holocaust, a found footage romp that plays into our most primal concerns: life, death, sex, and eating well.
From exceptionally clever raptors, compys, and full-blown rex rampages, things rarely go well for the Isla Nublar visitor who strays into the wilderness.
Year: 1987
Tomatometer: 78%
Arnold Schwarzenegger and his military buddies unfurl the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely and get picked off individually by an invisible alien menace.
Year: 1979
Tomatometer: 99%
Vietnam War movies are ripe ground for crazy dangerous jungles, where the fog of war is compounded by the elements and enemy combatants with home turf advantage. The insane shoot of Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece is a metaphor for madness in front of and behind the camera.
Year: 2009
Tomatometer: 83%
Marauding beasts and carnivorous plants make up the forests of Pandora, life-threatening to those not “connected” into the moon planet’s subconscious.
Year: 1981
Tomatometer: 95%
Our first introduction to Indiana Jones is in this Peruvian forest where tribesmen and young Alfred Molina conspire to kill him.
Year: 2006
Tomatometer: 65%
In Mel Gibson’s slavishly authentic epic, the prophesied end of the Mayan world unfolds in the Mesoamerican rainforest.
Year: 2005
Tomatometer: 84%
In both the original King Kong and the Peter Jackson remake, leave nothing but footprints…and try not to get caught in one either.
Year: 1995
Tomatometer: 22%
In slightly more manageable ape menaces, a group of university researchers travel to Zaire (back when there was one) where they encounter aggressive gorillas and a diamond conspiracy.
Year: 1972
Umberto Lenzi’s Man From Deep River was the first movie to combine cannablism and jungle scenery, creating the template that Italian directors would use in the following years.
Year: 1977
The movie to fully kickstart the cannibal boom, directed by Ruggero Deodato (who would go on to direct Cannibal Holocaust three years later).
Year: 1977
Anthropophagus director Joe D’Amato appropriated the Emanuelle character and sent her deep into the Amazon, introducing guts and gore to the softcore sex icon.
Year: 1978
Set in New Guinea, Mountain stars Dr. No‘s Ursula Andress, one of the biggest names to get down and dirty in this subgenre.
Year: 1980
Directed again by Lenzi, Eaten Alive features many actors from the rest of the cannibal movies (including porn star Robert Kerman) and typical elements (rape, murder, and real on-camera animal killings).
Year: 1980
One of the “draws” of the cannibal jungle movie is its anti-imperalist undertones while using extreme ethnic stereotypes. Cannibal Queen plays with this conceit: a father who returns to the jungle where his teenage daughter was capture is horrified to find the cannibals have made her their queen.
Year: 1981
The final cannibal movie from genre grandaddy Umberto Lenzi, with an even greater emphasis on animal murder and human gential mutilation. The subgenre pretty much puttered to an end after this.
Year: 1986
One more to chew on: Based on the “true story” of Catherine Miles, a teenager whose parents are killed in the Amazon but she survives after falling in love with one of the cannibals. Awww.
Year: 2006
Tomatometer: 91%
Based on the true story of a pilot shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War.
Year: 1994
Tomatometer: 72%
Forrest Gump returning to save soldiers in Vietnam, a decision that literally bites him in the ass.
Year: 2003
Tomatometer: 33%
Bruce Willis and his Navy SEAL team plunge head first into Nigeria to save Monica Bellucci amidst a civil war.
Year: 2008
Tomatometer: 83%
A parodic combination of Apocalypse Now and Hollywood inside jokes, Thunder drops a bunch of actors who think they’re shooting a movie in a real jungle of land mines and drug cartels.
Year: 2009
Tomatometer: 26%
Will Ferrell looks happy here, blissfully unaware he’s about to get in touch with the thirstiest mutant mosquito ever.
Year: 2008
Tomatometer: 48%
Another group of tourists who get more than they bargained for from their vacation. When will you learn, people?! Stay indoors, read film criticism — that’s all there is to life.
