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Decider Lists
With the launch of Disney’s Jungle Cruise, the time felt right to compile a list of the best jungle-set films currently streaming across all platforms. In making this list, I was guided by certain parameters like: a forest is not a jungle and, almost as importantly, the jungle needs to play a role in what happens. It doesn’t need to be a character in the film, whatever that means, but it does need to matter that it’s in the jungle.
I also wrestled with whether or not to include Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust which is as inarguably influential as it is inarguably vile in its documentary footage of the torture and mutilation of animals. I don’t have a lot of lines in movies that I don’t cross, but animal snuff is one of them. This is not to say one shouldn’t watch it if one desires a complete accounting for Italian Mondo Cane exploitation fare, and a particularly effective one at that – only that I’m going to leave it off this list because it makes me sick.
Special mention to John Woo’s incredible Bullet in the Head, not currently available for streaming in the United States, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet and Angelina Jolie’s great First They Killed My Father, that just narrowly miss the cut.
With that, all aboard, keep your hands inside the boat, and join me as we gaze upon these twelve marvels of the savage, untamed wilderness.
'Romancing The Stone' (1984)
Robert Zemeckis’ warm up for Back to the Future was this action/romance featuring Kathleen Turner at the height of her popularity paired with Michael Douglas at the peak of his. What results is this grand, bawdy, sexy tale of romance-writer Turner who flies to Columbia to rescue her kidnapped sister only to herself be rescued from a band of treasure-hunting jewel thieves by Douglas’ exotic bird smuggler. That’s right. The world’s dirtiest mudslide, rounds of fisticuffs, and a crocodile pit that suggests Romancing the Stone is maybe a Peter Pan story ends with a brand new best-seller for our courageous wordsmith, and a new boat for the guy selling parrots to suburbanites. The ’80s!
'The Lost City of Z' (2016)
James Gray’s epic biopic of British explorer Percy Fawcett, sent on a doomed errand to the Brazilian rainforest in pursuit of a mythical city and for the kind of social esteem that he’s denied at home. Grey is an acquired taste and has a tendency to narrate where his images don’t require it but there’s a scene early on when one of the native slaves pressed into service on his expedition tells him about the Lost City’s wonders: the multicultural eutopia thriving along streets lined with gold, that casts a shadow over the horrors of the rest of the film. “I feel sorry for you English. I am free. You will never escape the jungle” and while he may not mean it literally, the way that the natural defeats our attempts at civilization is indeed the seed of all of our inevitable destruction. It’s a beautiful film perhaps too in love with the sound of its own voice (see also Gray’s Ad Astra which would have been one of the best films of the year had it had a quarter of the monologues), but full of extraordinary moments that are difficult – some would say impossible – to shake.
'Apocalypto' (2006)
Certifiable insane person Mel Gibson’s certifiably insane Apocalypto represents the expenditure of a good portion of his Passion of the Christ giallo gains in the pursuit of a jungle adventure film featuring a cast of all Mayan actors, exclusively speaking Yucatec, in an approximation of early-sixteenth century Yucatan. It opens with, of all things, a tapir hunt and ends with one of the most horrific “twist” reveals in the long and storied history of such things while, between, warrior Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), after having his village raided and his pregnant wife abducted as fodder for human sacrifice, races across the mesoamerican jungle in desperate pursuit. Relentless, violent, absolutely lawless and unpredictable, it is one of the finest works of cinematic madness of all time: a film that should not exist, should not have been told by this person (who probably thinks the film has a happy ending) and, at the end, shouldn’t be nearly as fantastic as it is.
'Fitzcarraldo' (1982)
The first of two Werner Herzog films on this list and already the second biopic, find here Klaus Kinski as Irishman Brian Sweeney “Fitzcarraldo” Fitzgerald who, for whatever reason, wants to pull a steamship over a mountain pass in the Amazon Basin in order to open an opera house in a rubber-rich area. In real-life, Fitzcarraldo disassembled the ship for the journey, in Herzog’s version, he drags it up and over using native bearers and logs. If you listen to the commentary you’ll hear Herzog marvel that what we are witnessing is impossible and indeed there’s a sense of the doomed conquistador in Herzog’s maniacal insistence to capture things that should not be. Started with Jason Robards and Mick Jagger (almost half was completed), the production had to start from scratch when dysentery claimed his star and a world tour claimed the Rolling Stones frontman. Rumor has it that one of the native extras in the film offered to murder Kinski on behalf of Herzog and lose the body in the jungle. All behind the scenes drama aside, there’s something almost religious about Fitzcarraldo: mesmeric, hallucinogenic, and shockingly, only the second best jungle movie in Herzog’s career.
'Death In The Garden' (1956)
The film is a parable of Franco’s Spain from which surrealist Luis Bunuel had exiled himself in Mexico for a brief, productive, few years: a cruel, ironic satire the venal brokenness of men that leads inevitably to intractable classism and fascism. We’re just monkeys in clothes and however we use civilization to disguise that, our behaviors are only ever driven by the desire to accumulate resources in the pursuit of sexual access and material resources. Opening with a miners’ revolt against a government annexation, what at first appears to be a socialist parable quickly becomes a far more thorny, more interesting too, tale of hypocrisy and betrayal. Georges Marhcal is a mercenary who leads a small band of refugees fleeing the government suppression of the labor uprising. His charges include a prostitute (Simone Signoret), a priest (Michel Piccoli), and an old miner and his hearing-imparied daughter (Charles Vanel and Michèle Girardon). After finding themselves near-starving deep in the jungle, they discover a plane wreck and begin to reestablish a civilization every bit as corrupt and divided as the one they fled. A precursor to Bunuel’s own Viridiana as well as American New Wave classics like Night Moves, really, everyone should have known better as soon as they discovered the mercenary’s name was “Shark.”
'The Mosquito Coast' (1986)
Harrison Ford and Peter Weir, the world as their oyster after Witness, follow-up with this pitch-dark Paul Schrader adaptation of Paul Theroux’s cautionary tale about a guy just smart enough about Capitalism and its ills to destroy his family in the jungle where he takes them to escape it. An urgent picture that would’ve been more at home ten years earlier, it’s only now being resurrected (and remade as a multi-part limited television series on Apple TV+) as our anti-hero’s warnings begin to ring like prophecy in our pandemic-broken age. I’ve written about it previously in greater detail in these pages, here.
'Red Dust' (1932)
Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and Mary Astor are three points of a torrid love triangle in Victor Fleming’s pre-code Red Dust. Released during that two-year period between Hollywood promising to behave itself and actually behaving itself, Harlow plays a prostitute working Gable’s Indochinese rubber plantation. She sets her eyes on Gable as a way out of her life of “not sleeping at night, anyway” and Gable, for his part, sets his eyes on well-to-do socialite Astor who represents for him the same sort of social upgrade. The natural world acts as analogue to the passions roiling between these three, very sweaty, performers in a brew so combustible Gable was partnered with Harlow for another five outings. And folks who think Harlow was just a pretty face, note her heartbreak when she discovers that her hopes are being dashed. She’s the predecessor in a lot of ways to Giulietta Masina’s Cabiria. I should mention, too, that what some see as a horrifying depiction of Asians in this film, I see as an accurate reflection of how Asians are still viewed in America. There’s a scene in the new Jungle Cruise where a character is mocked for bringing tennis rackets to the jungle – it could be a reference to Red Dust.
'Predator' (1987)
The quintessential film of the 1980s is this John McTiernan jungle actioner in which all the wrath of the American military complex (secret weapon: arrogant sense of invincibility) is undone by an invisible extraterrestrial sport hunter. Arnold Schwartzenegger, the unlikeliest of the stable of unlikely beefy ’80s matinee idols, stars as “Dutch,” sent into the jungles of Central America on a rescue mission to find themselves the most dangerous game for one of the decade’s key bogeys. A re-litigation of the Vietnam War in which we lead with our sense of superiority to be sent packing with our tails between our legs, again, the victim as we always are of our exceptional hubris. Broadly considered the blockbuster era, a reconsideration of the films of the ’80s finds it thick with these revolutionary salvos. Nowhere more than in this film where the jungle, at times, seems to literally come alive.
'Sorcerer' (1977)
William Friedkin’s jungle adventure finds a band of miscreants and outcasts in a Latin American backwater, the beneficiaries, if you’d call them that, of a sequence of events including a Palestinian rebellion, Irish gang activity, Nazis and charges of insider trading. It seems a jumble until you realize that Sorcerer is about greed and the stain of colonialism, all rolled into the metaphor of a treacherous 200 mile truck ride transporting a shipment of nitroglycerin across, among other things, a rotted out wood bridge. With the jungle literally on fire because of their avarice and desperation, the only quiet part of the film comes in a last dance. It’s home to Roy Scheider’s best performance in a career packed with superlative performances – and though derided at the time, it’s since been acknowledged as one of the great films of the greatest decade of American film.
'Princess Mononoke' (1997)
Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki’s ecological fantasy is epic in scope and absolutely stunning in execution. It’s as incredible an action film as it is a sociological document and the key moment in which the story moves involves a band of former prostitutes who prove to be formidable in the face of intimidation. In it, a cursed Prince, dying of a deadly contagion, meets a spirit of the wood – well, lots of them – but namely Princess Mononoke with whom he forges an uneasy alliance to combat the corrupting influences of industrialized pollution. It’s a Romanticist tract in that way – an adaptation in spirit of William Blake’s “Tyger Tyger” where the natural world stands in terror of the encroachment of man. Its images are profound and indelible.
'Apocalypse Now' (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola famously said that he wasn’t making a film about Vietnam, that Apocalypse Now was Vietnam. Ridiculous and a little offensive, the spirit of this statement does capture the madness and scale of a machine that has jumped its tracks and ended up somehow as something very much like a diary of hallucinatory doom and madness. By turns epic and intimate, this loose adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness can also be read as the shadow of The Wizard of Oz in which various aspects of the American unconscious are sent upriver to find a soldier, Marlon Brando, who has gone far, far off the reservation. One of the most transformative movie-going experiences of all time, one can mark their experience as the time before they’ve seen this film and the time after. Though I place myself in the deep minority on this, I prefer the “Redux” version that adds a soul-sick sequence with Playboy Bunnies stranded by typhoon and the derided “French Plantation” scene that, for me, works as an uncanny, almost surrealistic, reprieve in the middle of all this incredible weight of evil. We never left the jungle. We died there.
'Aguirre The Wrath Of God' (1972)
Herzog’s masterpiece is one of the world’s masterpieces as mad Aguirre (Kinski) betrays his conquistador Pizarro to found the “purest nation” under heaven for Spain and God. Like Apocalypse Now, natural disasters plagued the production and, like Coppola’s film again, Aguirre incorporated the disasters into the body of the film. Its first shot, of an endless train of Spaniards and their native bearers traversing an impassable mountain pass, is unearthly, insane, and Kinski’s performance – which he modeled after a crab – matches the chaotic evil of it note for note. As the doomed expedition progresses, the jungle seems to come alive, picking off our antiheroes one after another. An image of horse abandoned by a corpulent, petulant nobleman, is one that I have never been able to shake. Popul Vuh provides one of world cinema’s great scores and the stories of its making are as fascinating and engaging as the film itself. No small feat as Aguirre the Wrath of God is a foundational picture for any film education. Oh – curiously enough, Jungle Cruise appears to be a part of the Aguirre cinematic universe, so whatever you think of the film, it’s done some research.
Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.
