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Allegedly based on a true story: When celebrating her 18th birthday on a
boat on the Amazon river, Catherine Miles (Elvire Audray) sees her parents
killed before her very eyes while she herself is only temporarily paralized by
an arrow dipped in Curare. However, she is dragged off to a village of
headhunters, the Gueneras, who at first treat her like an animal, humiliate
her, deflower her with a stick & make her the wife/slave of the tribe's
richest man. But Catherine has caught the eye of the tribe's biggest warrior
Umukai (Will Gonzalez), who secretly watches over her, makes sure her
punishment is not too severe after an escape attempt, saves her when her
master/husband wants to rape her, & fights with him to the death over the
woman - & of course he wins. But despite the fact that Umukai, her new
master/husband, respects her & never takes her by force, Catherine hates
him, thinking he has killed her parents. It is not until a group of white men
in a helicopter slaughter most of the tribe with a machine gun & Catherine
& Umukai deserately have to flee that he tells her what really happened to
her parents: That neither he nor his tribe are responsible for their deaths but
her own uncle & aunt, who wanted to take over her parents plantation. Catherine
is so taken by that that she immediately falls in love with him, has sex with
him & persuades him to accompany her to White Man Country. Once there,
she visits the plantation of her parents now owned by her uncle & aunt,
enters their bedroom & brutally slaughters them. & after Umukai commits
suicide because he cannot accept his wife exacting revenge, she gives herself
up to the police. After a trial (which makes up the framing device of the
movie that is mainly told in flashbacks), she is sent to an asylum where she
spends many years. Today, we learn, she is married to an architect & has
a son, but she cannot forget her first true love, Umukai. Rather a
mess of a jungle movie, with a chaotic & at the same time totally blatant
script, indifferent direction, bad acting accompanied by worse dialogues, &
- compared to other jungle-exploitation pix of its time, actually rather
restrained, concerning both sleaze & violence - whcih seems to be rather by
accident, since several attempts are made at being just as sleazy (e.g. the
heroine runs around topless during most of the movie) & violent (e.g.
plenty of stock-footage of animals eating other animals for real is included in
this movie) as any other movie, & scriptwriter Franco E.Prosperi
(co-creator of the notorious Mondo Cane series) is not a man
known for subtleties in the first place.
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