Henry and his gleaming hair from Terror in the Jungle

There’s a special little subgenre of films that I like to call “accidentally awesome.” They’re awful, yet in spite of every terrible choice their creators make, they manage by some unnamable, unreproducible alchemy to become schlocktastic gold—hilarious, and even charming in their own right. Having a deeply ironic appreciation of camp and crap combined with a hearty dose of sarcasm and a well-honed ability to suspend disbelief is very helpful in enjoying the accidentally awesome film, and the horror genre is blessed with more than its share of these treasures.

Although it’s not strictly a horror film (unless you worked on it), Terror in the Jungle, released in 1968, is a little-known masterpiece of accidentally awesome. It will have you alternately bellowing “WTF?” at the screen and snorting your beverage of choice out your nose with laughter and disbelief.

Warning: Spoilers ahead. But honestly, you shouldn’t care, because there’s so much crap to unpack in this film.

Terror in the Jungle opens with a Love-Boat-like scene with a bunch of quirky characters boarding a plane for South America. There’s five-year-old Henry, who, along with the trusty stuffed tiger he won’t let go of for the ENTIRE film, is being sent by his father to meet his mother in Rio. There’s the rock band in the silk shirts and Edith Bunker fright wigs running away from their adoring fans. There’s the famous widow clinging to a mysterious suitcase, the wannabe actress, the business tycoon, the woman with the bird in a cage, the older couple, and the two nuns (one of whom looks like Elliot Gould) escorting the body of a third in a coffin. As the flight begins—and after a slight interruption for a slate thanking the Peruvian government for their cooperation in making the film that appears about 10 minutes in—we begin to get to know the characters and are treated to a performance of the band’s hit song “Soft Lips” in the aisles, with accompaniment by a full band that’s apparently invisible.

Don’t get too attached to these characters, though, because suddenly the plane is losing fuel, and someone decides it’s a good idea to reduce the weight. They start by tossing out the body of the dead nun, but this results in one of the other sisters getting sucked out of the plane as well. They throw out some luggage, and the lady with the bird offers up her bird and cage, which of course weigh almost nothing. They crash in the Amazon River, and several passengers die, including Bird Lady, who, in a nice touch of irony, we see with the cage smashed on her head. But the plane is going to explode—because in bad movie logic, any vehicle that crashes must explode—so the rest of the passengers have to jump into the Amazon—straight into the jaws of the hungry crocodiles waiting below.

The remaining flight crew put Henry in a life jacket, set him and his trusty tiger afloat in like Moses on the Nile in the nun’s empty coffin, and explode with the plane. Because how else are you going to get rid of the dozen characters you’ve just spent all this time introducing? It’s like Airplane crossed with ‘60s Batman and an episode of Sealab 2020. And this is just the first 25 minutes of the film.

Henry’s coffin-boat runs ashore, and like any other kid with no sense, he leaves his life preserver and jacket on a branch somewhere and starts walking through the jungle. The footage in the jungle is a far-from-seamless combination of stock taken from an older Peruvian film and newer stuff filmed in Peru and the exotic wilds of Griffith Park in Los Angeles. Henry is found by a tribe of what are obviously Jívaros, easily identified by their polyester loincloths and bobbed rayon wigs.

One of the Jívaros wants to kill Henry, but others believe him to be the son of their god Inti because of his golden blonde hair, which gleams in the sunlight thanks to a delightfully bad special effect. They take him back to their village, and since this is a bad movie, poorly choreographed ritual dance ensues in front of a poorly constructed pyramid. If you view this part as actual representation of the Jívaros, it’s insulting. If you view it as a lost episode of Gilligan’s Island where the Minnow blows up before it makes it to the island, Gilligan is the only survivor, and the headhunters welcome Gilligan to the island with an LSD party, it’s hilarious.

Meanwhile, Henry’s father flies to Peru and puts together a team of male stock characters to search for Henry, including a priest who has been working with the Jívaros and agrees to help find Henry in order to fulfill some vaguely defined redemption arc. He eventually manages this after a fashion by falling prey to piranhas, because all movies about the Amazon must have piranha deaths in them.

Henry, who has been crying almost nonstop since he was on the plane, is saved by a woman from the tribe, and when the tribe is attacked by another tribe, he runs off into the jungle, tiger in hand and chased by the man who wants to kill him. A long pursuit ensues, and Henry is trapped in quicksand. It’s fair to wonder, if you haven’t already, if all the crying is real, and if Jimmy Angle, the kid who played Henry, wasn’t mentally scarred for life.

Ultimately Henry is saved by his stuffed tiger, who, in a bit of magical realism, transforms into a real leopard and mauls the man chasing Henry. The horror of the scene is undercut somewhat because you can clearly see that the animal is chained to a tree. Henry’s father manages to find him because of the lost jacket and life preserver. Henry pleads with his dad to go back for the toy tiger that saved him. Dad says no, thus cementing Henry’s trauma forever.

We know very little about how this film was made, which is a shame, because there’s a book in there somewhere. Filming on Terror in the Jungle began with an incomplete script written by the producer, which isn’t unusual, but they used unknown actors—so unknown that several of them actually paid the producer to be in the movie. The only actor who might be recognizable to MonsterZine readers is Fawn Silver, who was also in Ed Wood’s Orgy of the Dead as Criswell’s companion, the Vampira-ish “Black Ghoul.” The first director, Tom DeSimone, bailed after the plane scene was shot because of constant arguments with the producer and because the Peru scenes weren’t written yet, and went on to direct gay porn. His comments about the film on IMDB are priceless.

The second director, Andy Janzack, who was actually the cameraman during the first shoot, shot the Peruvian portions that aren’t stock footage. Apparently when the crew returned from Peru, they realized they couldn’t blend the first and second batches of film, and after fighting with Janzack, the producer hired the third director, Alex Graton, to straighten it out. Graton shot the Griffith Park footage and inserted the stock footage to create the bogglingly original mess we have today.

Terror in the Jungle is the result of a bunch of wrong turns and nutty decisions made by people with a vision, but a tiny budget and even less experience. Films like this are their own form of “what on earth IS that?” art, and there just isn’t another movie like this one out there. Perhaps that’s for the best, but if you like finding the beauty in the bad, this film will make you feel like you’ve hit the jackpot. Inti has smiled upon you, because someone has uploaded the film in all its glory to YouTube, and you can judge for yourself.