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A man enters attorney George Bennett's (Alex Frazer), for 2 reasons:
one, he might murder a man & would thus need an attorney, and two
because the office is right opposite the police station, where he expects
the man he intends to murder to show up in a few minutes time. But why ...
?
Steve Blake (Leif Erikson) - the man in the attorney's office) is a
pilot somewhere in Africa, takning on pretty much every job offered to him
... & this time the job offered is from diamond mine owner Mark Harper
(Douglass Dumbrille), who claims to hvve some problems with natives at his
mine somewhere deep in the African bush, & he wants Steve to find out
where they live ... a job that sounds fishy to Steve right from the
beginning, but he & his sidekick Hoppy (Frank Jenks) accept anyway.
The situation is not made much better when Harper's wife Connie (Veda Ann
Borg) turns out to be one of Steve's one-night-stands who claims she has
still feelings for him - mainly because she wants him to get her out of
Africa -, & her husband, notoriously jealous, is less than pleased
that she & Steve are old acquaintances.
But as if all that wasn't bad enough, once on their job, Steve &
Hoppy have to make an emergency landing deep in the jungle, & are
almost immediately taken captive by a native tribe - the very tribe they
tried to find -, led by Meelah (Gale Sherwood), a white girl, who wants
all whites dead, thinking them to be in league with her arch enemy Harper
(& she is not all that wrong in this case). But Meelah's old medicine
man Tonga (Ernest Whitman) is more reasonable than her & keeps them
alive for the time being ... & soon, Steve & Hoppy are badly
needed after a native raid on Harper's mine has gone bad, & they use
the first aid kit of their plane to treat the natvies.
Soon, Tonga & Meelah trust Steve enough to show them the diary of
Meelah's parents (Cay Forrester, John Dehner), who have been killed in the
jungle by none other than Harper & his right hand man Berger (Matt
Willis) & she was only just saved by the natives ... To find out more,
& to gather evidence against Harper, Steve tries to teach Meelah &
Tonga a bit of English so they can paint him the whole picture ... &
he falls in love in the process (with Meelah, not with Tonga, silly),
& so does she.
Three weeks later, hoppy has repaired the airplane, & he &
Steve return to civilisation, giving Harper some bollocks of not having
found the natives at all & such ... but when Meelah, who has secretly
followed him on foot, turns up, Harper knows they have been lieing, takes
Steve & hoppy prisoner & has with his men follows Meelah to her
tribe (Meelah, you see, it the only evidence that Harper has killed her
parents) ...
But by now, Connie has grown so wary of her husband that she helps
Steve & Hoppy to escape & inform the proper authorities, who
interfere just as the natives & Harper's men are about to crash, &
can prevent any bloodshed - except for Meelah killing Berger, which is why
Harper drags her along when he is arrested, & only if he is found
guilty can she be found innocent ...
Back in the attorney's office, Harper does indeed exit the police
station ... but is shot by sonmeone else than Steve. As it turns out he
was trying to make a getaway - stopped short by a police bullte - after he
was found guilty, as tghe corpses of meelah's parents were found shot in
the head by very non-native bullets ...
In the end, naturally, Steve gets the girl (Meelah that is).
A better than usual PRC-jungle thriller, that despite some
rather ludicruous native scenes (best of all Meelah's hilarious warchant),
relies less on junglegirl genre mainstays but employs quite a few noir
elements - from the off-screen first-person narration to Veda Ann Borg
playing a great (but essentially well-meaning) femme fatale to the
underlying storyline (a man, thrown by fate [& past sins] into
situations [almost] too big for him to handle) as such - which may sound
like a strange combination (after all this is a film about a white
jugnlegirl), but works perfectly in the movie.
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