Safari Express

Italy/West Germany 1976
directed by Duccio Tessari
starring Giuliano Gemma, Ursula Andress, Jack Palance, Enzo Bottesini, Giuseppe Maffioli, Peter Martell (= Pietro Martellanza), Manfred Freyberger, Ilse Zaal, Raf Baldassarre
music by Guido De Angelis & Maurizio De Angelis

review by
Mike Haberfelner

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John Baxter (Giuliano Gemma), who organizes safaris for a living, one day finds beautiful Miriam (Ursula Andress) in the jungle, who suffers from amnesia. In a seemingly unrelated incident, he & his partner Howard (Enzo Bottesini) are hired by rich arms-dealer Van Daalen (Jack Palance) to smuggle some weapons to native prince Udine, who wants to become the chief of his brother's tribe. While John refuses the offer, not wanting to cause tribal warfare,  Howard accepts, lured by 100.000,- Dollars. But when Van Daalen wants to get rid of John - who he believes might do everything possible to stop the weapons delivery - & has Udine attack the mission John stays at, Miriam regains her memory & thus she & John find out that Van Daalen is really after an uranium mire on the tribe's land he would get his hands on would Udine be chief.

Of course John can soon chase Udine & his men away from the mission & even stop the weapons' delivery, but Van Daalen has yet another ace up his sleeve, as he plans to just bomb the tribe via airplane, & he asks Howard to be of assistance, & when he refuses, shoots him. But Howard stays alive long enough to spill the beans about this plan to John who takes up pursiut & finally forces Van Daalen's plane to crash in the final airplane chase. John in the end marries Miriam of course.

While this might sound like a straight African-adventure movie, it is actually more played like a comedy, with even a chimpanzee as Giuliano Gemma's sidekick. Unfortunately though, the movie is not really funny, with most of Gemma's oneliners pretty stale & many of the comic supporting roles (e.g. the incompetent gay police seargeant) a pure embarrassement. As an adventure movie it fails on the other hand, as it just has standard situations loosely connected to each other in no particular order instead of a decent storyline, & little effort is made to create suspense or uphold the tension.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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