Jungle Films (genre)

Strange monsters invade the Jungle!

Summary

"Whatever may be said against the plausibility of the story of East of Borneo (1931 film)... there is no denying that it has its full quota, in fact a plethora, of jungle thrills. And while the players were probably never in any danger, the effect is there, for the scenes of tigers, pumas, pythons, crocodiles and monkeys have been spliced neatly into those depicting the human beings. Fearing that there might not be enough excitement in these sequences, which are supposed to be in the far reaches of Borneo, the producers offer a volcano, which spouts lava and flames for the final stretch."
- NY Times, 1931

Details

• Settings: Delta Green, Pulp Cthulhu, Old Solar System Venus
• Campaigns:
• TVTropes: (link)

Film List

• Jungle Jim (1934 franchise) - 16 feature films (based on a 1934 comic strip, and including a radio show, comic books, a 12-part 1930s serial starring Grant Withers, and 1950s television series) about an Asia-based two-fisted hunter/explorer/adventurer Jim "Jungle Jim" Bradley (played by Johnny Weissmuller of Tarzan fame), who braves deadly jungles, quicksand, lost temples of doom, man-eating plants, giant spiders, cannibal savages, killer apes, moth-eaten stuffed lions, stock footage of random African, South American, and Asian wildlife, the usual safaris full of evil spies and saboteurs, mad scientists, land-grabbers, and other moustache-twirling villains, and other terrifying dangers of the pulp jungle, armed with little more than fisticuffs and an improbably neat and clean white outfit....
• Monster from Green Hell (1957 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - A scientific expedition in Africa investigates wasps that have been exposed to radiation and mutated into giant, killing monsters.
• From Hell It Came (1957 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - A wrongfully accused South Seas prince is executed, and returns as a walking tree stump.
• Omoo-Omoo the Shark God (1949 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - Written by Herman Melville. The curse of a shark god follows a group of people who have violated a sacred jungle idol.
• East of Borneo (1931 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - A woman treks through jungle, braving snakes and alligators, to find her missing doctor husband.
• The Savage Girl (1932 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - A white jungle goddess is protected by a fierce killer gorilla.
• Beast of Borneo (1934 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - A crazed scientist needs primates to conduct experiments to prove his own theory of evolution, so he organizes an expedition into the jungles of Borneo to capture the animals he needs.
• Lost Jungle (1934 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - An animal trainer and his press agent find marooned people and a buried city.
• Drums of Africa (1941 film) AKA Jungle Man (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - An expedition sets out to darkest Africa to find the fabled City of the Dead, and must battle thick jungle, hostile natives, wild animals and a deadly epidemic.
• Jungle Drums of Africa (1953 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - The daughter of a medical missionary in Africa carries on her father's work after he dies. She befriends two adventurers prospecting for uranium, and before long she finds herself in danger from crooks trying to get the uranium for themselves and a local witch doctor who sees her as a threat to his power.
• Jungle Siren (1942 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - With Buster Crabbe. A woman who was raised in the jungle helps a man fight Nazis who are trying to start a native uprising.
• Law of the Jungle (1942 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - A scientist and a fugitive nightclub singer expose Nazis in the Rhodesian jungle.
• Nabonga (1944 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - With Buster Crabbe. When a treasure hunter seeks a downed airplane in the jungles of Africa, he encounters one of the passengers' young daughter, now fully grown, and with a gorilla protector.
• Ebb Tide (1937 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - Written by Robert Louis Stevenson. Three shifty sailors commandeer a smallpox-ridden boat and set out to sea. A typhoon washes them ashore on a faraway Pacific island, which is ruled by a white religious fanatic who has set himself up as the local god. A remake of a 1922 lost silent film of the same name; remade again as Adventure Island (1947 film) .
• Adventure Island (1947 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - By Robert Louis Stevenson. Travelers find themselves marooned on an island with a maniacal self-made ruler.
• Blonde Savage (1947 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - An expedition into the deep jungle discovers a native tribe led by a tall white blonde woman.
• Queen of the Amazons (1947 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - A woman's husband has disappeared on an expedition into the jungle. She hires a guide to take her into the jungle to find him. However, they discover that he has been captured by a savage female tribe.
• Panther Girl of the Kongo (1955 serial) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - "Jungle Jim" inspired film serial that mixes several stock serial plots including the Stock Footage Safari, the "land grab", exotic location, jungle girl, and mad scientist.
• West of Zanzibar (1928 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - A magician seeks vengeance upon the man who paralyzed him and the illegitimate daughter he sired with the magician's wife. Dir. Tod Browning, with Lon Chaney & Lionel Barrymore
• Kongo (1932 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - Remake of West of Zanzibar (1928 film). Deep in the Zanzibar jungle, wheelchair-bound Flint rules over a native tribe with little other exposure to Europeans; his knowledge of hoary old vaudeville magic tricks leads them to believe he is a god. Driven nearly to insanity in his decades-long quest for revenge against the ivory trader who broke his spine and stole his wife, Flint kidnaps a convent initiate whom he believes to be Whitehall's daughter...
• African Queen (1951 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - With Humphry Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, directed by John Huston. In Africa during World War I, a gin-swilling riverboat captain is persuaded by a strait-laced missionary to use his boat to attack an enemy warship.
• White Orchid (1954 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - A romantic triangle leads to complications on an archaeological expedition in Southern Mexico.
• Secret of the Incas (1954 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - With Charlton Heston. An adventurer searchers for hidden treasure in the Peruvian jungle. (Film considered an inspiration for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981 film).)
• Bring 'Em Back Alive (1932 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - Part of a series of "adventure documentaries" filmed in Malaya and elsewhere starring/about real-life adventurer Frank Buck who captured animals for zoos.
• Wild Cargo (1934 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - Part of a series of "adventure documentaries" filmed in Malaya and elsewhere starring/about real-life adventurer Frank Buck who captured animals for zoos.
• Fang and Claw (1935 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - Part of a series of "adventure documentaries" filmed in Malaya and elsewhere starring/about real-life adventurer Frank Buck who captured animals for zoos.
• Jungle Cavalcade (1941 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - Part of a series of "adventure documentaries" filmed in Malaya and elsewhere starring/about real-life adventurer Frank Buck who captured animals for zoos.
• Jacare (1942 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - Part of a series of "adventure documentaries" filmed in Malaya and elsewhere starring/about real-life adventurer Frank Buck who captured animals for zoos.
• Jungle Menace (1936 serial) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - With Frank Buck. Set in the fictional land of Seemang in Asia, Buck plays the role of Frank Hardy, a soldier of fortune who intervenes in and investigates attempts to run a rubber plantation owner and his daughter off their land.
• Jungle Terror (1946 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - With Frank Buck. Set in the fictional land of Seemang in Asia, Buck plays the role of Frank Hardy, a soldier of fortune who intervenes in and investigates attempts to run a rubber plantation owner and his daughter off their land. (Re-edited feature film version of the 1937 serial, Jungle Menace.)
• Tiger Fangs (1943 film) (IMDB) ([ Watch]) - With Frank Buck. A big-game hunter travels to Malaya to help stop the Nazis and Japanese from destroying the rubber industry.
• Bring 'Em Back Alive (1982 series) (IMDB) - With Bruce Boxleitner. 1980s TV series (very) loosely based on the life and tales of Frank Buck; pith-helmeted Great White Hunter "Buck" (unlike the real Frank Buck) works out of the Raffles Hotel bar in Singapore during the 1930s, fighting all kinds of bad guys in pre-war Malaya.
• Apocalypse Now (1979 film) (IMDB) - By Joseph Conrad ("Heart of Darkness", uncredited), dir. Francis Ford Coppala, with Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando. During the Vietnam War, Captain Willard is sent on a dangerous mission into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade colonel who has set himself up as a god among a local tribe.
• Fitzcarraldo (1982 film) (IMDB) - With Klaus Kinski, by Werner Herzog. The story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, an extremely determined man who intends to build an opera house in the middle of a jungle, even if he has to drag a 300 ton riverboat over a small mountain to do so.
• Suddenly, Last Summer (1959 film) (IMDB) - By Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, with Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift. The only son of wealthy widow Violet Venable dies while on vacation with his cousin Catherine. What the girl saw was so horrible that she went insane; now Mrs. Venable wants Catherine lobotomized to cover up the truth.
• Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982 series) (IMDB) - The pulp-inspired adventures of 1930's Pacific Islands bush pilot Jake Cutter and his companions, including an archaeologist's daughter, a bumbling side-kick, a one-eyed "talking" dog co-pilot, and an assortment of other strange characters.
• Congo (1995 film) (IMDB) - (by Michael Crichton) Scientist Karen Ross is sent by her mogul father-in-law to the Congo to determine the whereabouts of his son's missing diamond-hunting team. Ross and a mismatched search party -- including an expert guide, a primatologist, a treasure hunter, and a gorilla -- discover a danger far more sinister than anything they expected to find, even in the heart of the jungle.
• Indiana Jones (1981 franchise) - A series of films (and Expanded Universe) produced by famous directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, which were inspired by the 1930s cliffhanger serials, and which (re)popularized the Adventurer Archaeologist. Armed with little more than a bullwhip and attitude ("little more" in this case meaning a .455 Webley), Indiana Jones discovers long-lost MacGuffins, fights Nazis over them, and makes love to the Girl of the Week. With the fourth film, produced 20 years later, the homage shifts to include Dirty Communists, '50s creatures and sci-fi films.

"Lovecraftian" Analysis

Lovecraft appears to have set very few stories in jungles, but a jungle setting does make an appearance in at least one collaboration tale ("In the Walls of Eryx"), and appear in the background of a couple others ("The Shadow Out of Time" apparently places the city of the Great Race in a prehistoric jungle, and a significant part of "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family" refers to second-hand accounts of characters' explorations and discoveries in Darkest Africa....)

Jungle films have frequently delved into Gothic Horror territory, the "Jungle Gothic", with the dense tropical vines and foliage concealing hideous and mind-shattering secrets, and Hungry Jungles full of man-eating diseases, insects, plants, animals, and cannibal tribes providing the backdrop for stories involving fevered madness and monstrous interpretations on the relationships between man, nature, gods, and himself, with the hellish temperatures providing a ready metaphor for everything from a humanity-consuming rage and revenge, to bizarre insanity, to the very fiery mouth of Hell itself. At their most Gothic, Jungle films will include - in addition to themes of monstrous secrets and human corruption and madness - some often bizarre monsters (including the typical man-eating plants and giant spiders), "witchcraft" in the form of Hollywood Voodoo (complete with voodoo zombies), blurred lines between man and animal and hunter and hunted (in the form of ape-men, cannibal savages, bloodthirsty dictators and cult leaders, etc.), confusion between the savagery of nature and religion, the heavenly beauty of the jungle when seen from a distance vs. the hellish reality once man descends into the bowels of its hidden horror, etc.

At the pulpier end of the spectrum, Jungle films were often little more than stock melodrama plots that fueled many of the "westerns" of the era given a new coat of green paint, replacing the evil cattle barons stealing gold mines and ranches from naive heiresses and the square-jawed and white-hatted cowboys who save the damsel-in-distress with two fists and six-guns before riding off into the desert sunset, with evil German spies stealing diamond or uranium mines or rubber plantations from naive heiresses and the square-jawed and white pith-helmeted explorers who save the damsel-in-distress with two fists and an elephant gun before riding off into the jungle sunset. Expect shallower versions of the same dangers that menace the characters of Jungle Gothic films to appear as simple obstacles for the heros, until the villains fall victim to the jungle in the end (perhaps by running away from the hero at the climax, and falling into the jaws of a hungry tiger or drowning in quicksand....)

The Call of Cthulhu Classic Era of the 1910s-1930s seems to have at least been the setting for a great number of these jungle adventures, and in fact appears to have been when a number of the earliest examples were made. Generic jungle adventure themes of seeking lost cities or elephants' graveyards (for exploitation of gold, ivory, diamonds, etc.), "Great White Hunters" on deadly safaris in unexplored jungles, military adventurism involving espionage and other interference from foreign governments in remote colonies, and even an entire sub-genre of action-adventure-documentaries following adventurers seeking nearly legendary wild animals for capture for zoos were common in this era, and might suggest plot hooks for Lovecraftian stories.

Weird World War scenarios in general might be set in the jungles of colonial Africa (WWI), the Pacific (WWII), or in the Amazon rain forests (where Nazi defectors were supposed to have fled following the war, and where significant "gunboat diplomacy" involving "Banana Republics" would have taken place throughout the 19th and 20th centuries), or in the forests of Korea and Vietnam. Even the nearly-tropical forests, swamps, and bayous of Florida, Louisiana, and elsewhere in the Gulf of Mexico might also suggest some relatively exotic possibilities for stories set during the American Civil War or Colonial period.

The jungles of colonies in India, Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, China, and elsewhere provide fertile ground for Gaslight adventures in the British Empire.

Delta Green scenarios (especially those set in the 1960s and 1970s) seem like a natural fit for the jungles of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

The Pulp Cthulhu setting can suggest many possibilities for two-fisted adventure in the style of the Indiana Jones films.

From a more traditional science fiction angle, "Old Solar System" alternate-history space exploration (perhaps using Cthulhu Icarus as an inspiration) may find explorers exploring or surviving a hellish Venusian jungle, as seen in "In the Walls of Eryx (fiction)".

Associated Mythos Elements

• setting: Delta Green
• setting: Pulp Cthulhu
• setting: Old Solar System Venus (Cthulhu Icarus)
• setting: Pellucidar, Hollow Earth
• setting: Lost Continent (Mu, Lemuria, Atlantis, etc.)
• setting: Prehistoric Earth
• race/cult: Tcho-Tchos (typically with unfortunate implications)
• cult: ("Hollywood Voodoo") Voodoo/Juju cults (typically with unfortunate implications)
• race: Triffids
• race: Man-Eating Plants
• race: Giant Spiders
• race: Frazetta Man
• race: Zombies
• location: generic lost city
• location: generic jungle

Keeper Notes

• The investigators are hired to find out what happened to a missing scientist and his expedition by exloring their decaying makeshift laboratory and the surrounding jungle. When darkness arrives, the party begins to discover evidence of the scientist's occult interests in his feverish and ranting notebooks, and hear strange voices in the dark and discover that objects in the laboratory seem to move by themselves; the party soon realize that the laboratory, built on an ancient vine-choked ruin, hides a terrible secret to the scientist's disappearance.... (The Haunting (scenario))
• A scientific expedition in Africa investigates wasps that have been exposed to radiation and mutated into giant, killing monsters. (Monster from Green Hell)
• A wrongfully accused South Seas prince is executed, and returns as a terrifying vegetable horror of the jungle. (From Hell It Came)
• The curse of a shark god follows a group of people who have violated a sacred jungle idol. (Omoo-Omoo the Shark God)
• An animal trainer and his press agent find marooned people and a buried city. (Lost Jungle)
• An expedition sets out to darkest Africa to find the fabled City of the Dead, and must battle thick jungle, hostile natives, wild animals and a deadly epidemic. (Drums of Africa AKA Jungle Man)
• Travelers find themselves marooned on an island with a maniacal self-made ruler. (Adventure Island)
• Mad scientists unleash a monstrous crustacean and other biological horrors upon into the jungle as part of a "land grab" scheme. (Panther Girl of the Kongo)
• Deep in the Zanzibar jungle, wheelchair-bound former stage magician rules over a native tribe with little other exposure to Europeans; his knowledge of hoary old vaudeville magic tricks leads them to believe he is a god. Driven nearly to insanity in his decades-long quest for revenge against the ivory trader who broke his spine and stole his wife, the former magician hatches an evil plot to kidnap his enemy's innocent daughter from a convent and sell her into the corrupting influence of a depraved Cthulhu cult inhabiting the darkest regions of the jungle. (West of Zanzibar and Kongo)
• In Africa during World War I, a gin-swilling riverboat captain is persuaded by a strait-laced missionary to brave the horrors of the jungle and use his boat to attack an enemy warship. (African Queen)
• The "investigators" are simply hired by zoos or museums to travel the globe and hack their way into the densist jungles to capture or find rare specimens for the zoo/museum collections while camera crews film their exploits, and find more than they bargained for. (Bring 'Em Back Alive, Wild Cargo, Fang and Claw, Jungle Cavalcade, Jacare)
• In the fictional land of Seemang in Asia near the border of Leng, a party of soldiers of fortune intervene in and investigate attempts by a sinister cult to run a rubber plantation owner and his daughter off their land. (Jungle Menace/Jungle Terror)
• A party of mercenaries is sent on a dangerous mission into the jungle to assassinate a renegade colonel who has set himself up as a god over a cult drafted from a local tribe. (Apocalypse Now)
• A madman intends to build an opera house in the middle of a jungle, even if he has to drag a 300 ton riverboat over a small mountain to do so. A documentary crew filming the event runs afoul of a local chieftain and his tribe after trespassing on sacred land and destroying the jungle. (Fitzcarraldo)
• Sebastian, the only son of wealthy widow Violet Venable, dies while on vacation with his cousin Catherine. What the girl saw was so horrible that she went insane; now Mrs. Venable wants Catherine lobotomized to cover up the truth. The investigators must uncover the ghastly truth behind Sebastian's death and save the innocent girl before it is too late.(Suddenly, Last Summer)
• A mismatched search party -- including a scientist, an expert guide, a primatologist, a treasure hunter, and a gorilla -- discover a danger far more sinister than anything they expected to find, even in the heart of the jungle. (Congo)