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An airplane, filled mainly with fugitives from Chile, is abducted because one of the passengers
(Siegfried Schürenberg) is a Chilenean bank president with a bag of
(embezzled) jewels, & everyone wants to get their hands on those.
But instead of landing on an abandoned landing strip, the plane crashes
in the jungle, forcing the survivors to make their way to civilization
again. Soon enough though, this motley crew is at each others throats -
not at least for the jewels - & some of them (Schürenberg among
them) have to bite the dust. It doesn't help the situation at all that a
gang of bandits lead by Howard Vernon is on their trail as well, to get
the jewels of course. In the very end, only 2 of the plane-crash
survivors are still alive, Thomas Hunter & Gila Weitershausen. He is
the straight hero who has fallen in love with her, but she has an agenda
all of her own, an agenda that does involve the jewels but not
necessarily him. She does seem to win over him in the end, being in
league with gangster-mastermind Paul Muller, but Hunter, always the good
guy, has already told everything to the police.
Surely not one of Jess Franco's greatest pictures, but it's still
worth a look. The script itself is strictly standard formula for a
German exotic adventure, a formula that has been tried & true
since at least the 50's. Unfortunately, in the early 70's the popularity
of these movies has long since waned, thus the budgets for them were
shrinking, too. It's much to Franco's creditto make anything of interest
out of this by having much of it played tongue-in-cheek & gracing
the stupid story with his own cinematic language, this being strange
camera angles & set-ups, massive zoom-ins & zoom-outs, often
during the same shot, bumpy camera movements and out-of-focus shots, and
bits of nudity thrown in just for good measure.
Thomas Hunter, as straight male hero is rather uninteresting, as
Franco never really knew how to deal with straight male heroes (which
isn't necessarily a fault), but Howard Vernon's performance as the
alcoholic Brazillian villain is really that over the top that it alone
would make the movie worth watching !
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