Director Jonathan Hensleigh (the writer of such classics as Armageddon and Die Hard 3) has gotten together with the producer of Æon Flux and Hulk to give us a modern Hollywood take on the cannibal genre.
The story? Four young adventurers head into jungle cannibal country in search of the missing Michael Rockefeller. Found footage that they shot on their journey tells their story. Sounds a bit like Cannibal Holocaust? Yeah, pretty much.
So what do we get? Well pretty much what one would expect. The production values and acting are pretty decent. The story is pretty much unoriginal, very similar to Cannibal Holocaust with a few changes. We get no sex, no rape, no animal killing. We get a tiny, itsy-bitsy bit of tit. Gore wise we get a few found body parts but most of the killing is off screen. This is a cannibal movie aiming for a mainstream audience.
Pacing-wise it is more like The Blair Witch Project. Rather than get a selection of atrocities along the journey (as typical with 80's cannibal flicks) this journey mostly consists of our group fighting more and more among themselves with no real sign of the cannibals until the end.
This is the second unofficial remake of Cannibal Holocaust in recent years. The other was Bruno Mattei's Mondo Cannibale in 2003. This film is basically the anti-Mondo Cannibale. MC had some pretty bad acting and very low budget production values, but it gave us gore and gratuitous nudity and animal killings and all the other exploitation elements that CH was known for, though on the cheap.
On the other hand Welcome To The Jungle is a cannibal movie with all the exploitation elements removed. I'm not quite sure who the intended audience for this film is. Fans of old-school 80's exploitation cannibal movies are going to be disappointed and left wanting. Younger folks are going to think it a Blair Witch rip-off, albeit with a little bit more of a payoff.
I expect the upcoming CH remake will also suffer this kind of "mainstreaming", and I don't think it really works. I think there was a reason that the Americans pretty much stayed away from doing cannibal movies in the 80's, and that's because the whole point of the genre is that it is exploitive and non-mainstream. Take that away and, as Welcome To The Jungle demonstrates, there isn't much left.
The story? Four young adventurers head into jungle cannibal country in search of the missing Michael Rockefeller. Found footage that they shot on their journey tells their story. Sounds a bit like Cannibal Holocaust? Yeah, pretty much.
So what do we get? Well pretty much what one would expect. The production values and acting are pretty decent. The story is pretty much unoriginal, very similar to Cannibal Holocaust with a few changes. We get no sex, no rape, no animal killing. We get a tiny, itsy-bitsy bit of tit. Gore wise we get a few found body parts but most of the killing is off screen. This is a cannibal movie aiming for a mainstream audience.
Pacing-wise it is more like The Blair Witch Project. Rather than get a selection of atrocities along the journey (as typical with 80's cannibal flicks) this journey mostly consists of our group fighting more and more among themselves with no real sign of the cannibals until the end.
This is the second unofficial remake of Cannibal Holocaust in recent years. The other was Bruno Mattei's Mondo Cannibale in 2003. This film is basically the anti-Mondo Cannibale. MC had some pretty bad acting and very low budget production values, but it gave us gore and gratuitous nudity and animal killings and all the other exploitation elements that CH was known for, though on the cheap.
On the other hand Welcome To The Jungle is a cannibal movie with all the exploitation elements removed. I'm not quite sure who the intended audience for this film is. Fans of old-school 80's exploitation cannibal movies are going to be disappointed and left wanting. Younger folks are going to think it a Blair Witch rip-off, albeit with a little bit more of a payoff.
I expect the upcoming CH remake will also suffer this kind of "mainstreaming", and I don't think it really works. I think there was a reason that the Americans pretty much stayed away from doing cannibal movies in the 80's, and that's because the whole point of the genre is that it is exploitive and non-mainstream. Take that away and, as Welcome To The Jungle demonstrates, there isn't much left.