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Man from Deep River (1972) - aka “Deep River Savages”

Dir: Umberto Lenzi

Photographer John Bradley (the late Ivan Rassimov, sporting a blonde hairdo that makes him look like a member of the ‘Barda Meinhoff Group‘) is on the Thai/Bangkok border taking snaps when he gets into a fight with a knife-wielding loon in a bad Hawaiian shirt and stabs him in self-defence.
fleeing in-country from a possible murder charge (so casually he still finds time to stick his head out of train carriages to take fetching photos of the landscape) Bradley meets up with ‘Comedy Asian Guy Who Acts Like An American’ who bikes him around the local sights for more National Geographic photospread opportunities.

Wanting something more interesting to photograph Bradley and his sidekick head down the river into the jungle.
Oh dear, not a good move this because soon after starting their trip ‘Comedy Asian Guy Who Acts Like An American’ gets darted to death and Bradley is captured by the less than friendly natives, and ends up getting his arse whacked by a gang of noisy kids with big sticks.

Thus follows a tale of torture, trial and discovery as Bradley witnesses many shocking rites and gruesome customs as he struggles to survive and hopefully win over his captors.
It’s not all hardship though as tasty native babe Marayå (Me Me Lay) is giving him the kind of looks that say ‘take me now blonde boy’ and soon love blossoms in the jungle.
So perhaps things aren’t too bad?
No, sorry, they are indeed bad because one of the neighbouring tribes is cannibalistic…

 

Due to the fact I came to this movie after the rest of the Euro Cannibals films, I noticed the full extent of Lenzi’s laziness when he churned out “Eaten Alive”, a movie with perhaps the most disgracefully massive use of footage from other movies there has ever been .
I knew he ‘borrowed’ footage from Deodato’s excellent “Jungle Holocaust” and I knew he ‘borrowed’ footage from Sergio Martino‘s “Mountain of the Cannibal God” for it as I recognised the scenes.

But I later saw he also re-used not only footage from “Man from Deep River” as well (the killing of a native girl in the jungle by a pack of cannibals) but also some of its ideas. Remember the ‘lets have sex on top of this dead guy’s ashes’ sequence? Yeah…it was done here first.
Lazy Lenzi. What guy.
Even his otherwise stolen footage free “Cannibal Ferox” re-used (though to greater effect) the score from “Eaten Alive”. Ironic though I suppose to have that notorious scavenger of a movie actually scavenged from.

Anyway, I mentioned all that because its rather sad that Lenzi would later scavenge from the cycle of Euro Cannibal films he helped birth.
Although “Man” is most obviously derived from the Hollywood movie “A Man called Horse” (starring Richard Harris) where a white man is captured by a tribe, put through tortures and trials and makes shocking discoveries (Lenzi simply replaced the American Indians with jungle natives) and of course owes a debt to Cornell Wilde’s well-spring of ‘white guy in jungle trouble’ flicks “Naked Prey” and in a round about way to the 60’s ‘Mondo’ craze like “Africa Addio”, Lenzi’s film ultimately stands as the movie that made the infamous Euro Cannibal cycle possible because of it’s own unique elements in style as well as the kind of graphic footage that was utterly alien to any American movies outside of rare cult items like “Blood Feast”. And even then these effects were of a far nastier and realistic fashion.

Two years before zombies would eat human flesh in full garish colour in the excellent “Let Sleeping Corpses Lie“ and a full five years before such sights became huge with “Dawn of the Dead“, Lenzi has his cannibals chew on severed arms and eat bits of sliced breast in blood dripping close-up. This was heady stuff indeed in 1972. And over a decade later the film would find a cosy little spot on the early UK ‘Video Nasties’ lists, (later removed before the final/official list of 39 titles was drafted) where it briefly and ironically wallowed alongside it’s own children, “Cannibal Holocaust” and “Cannibal Ferox”.

The film also does something else unusual for the time (basically not seen outside of said ‘Mondo’ exploitation fare) and that’s show real animal deaths set-up for the camera.
Beastly Umberto ‘treats’ us to a mongoose vs. cobra fight, a cock fight, the nasty throat slitting of a goat and much fish and snake carnage.
The two most infamous animal snuff sequences though are the killing of a crocodile (in a way that those Al Qaeda freaks would just love) and the ‘monkey brains’ moment.
The monkey sequence is a strange one though. Certainly the monkey put into the table-vice is real and alive (with the top of its head sticking out…Lenzi would re-use - surprise, surprise - this idea in “Cannibal Ferox” though in that it was a man’s head stuck through the hole) and it’s certainly a real monkey that has the top of it’s head sliced off.
But the slicing footage shows a very still monkey which may mean it was dead already, and bizarrely the entire body then vanishes from under the table (leaving only the head in place, though now it’s obviously false) when it comes to the ‘snacking’ scene.
Certainly cruelty was here though and perhaps Lenzi simply had the poor monkey killed before slicing off its crown because the thing was too unruly, as it’s a close match to the obviously alive monkey that was placed in the vice a few seconds before.
So even if the head at the end of the sequence was false it seems the monkey was killed.

It’s a disgraceful sequence of course, as all the animal snuff footage in all the films that followed is, but like it or not these real death add impact to the false deaths and to the general savage atmosphere of the film (though that hardly means such cruelty was worth it).
And ultimately what’s done is done and there’s no going back to save the animals now.
And as with all exploitation it asks for no views from the audience, it could care less what you think or what your personal level of tolerance is.
You either watch the films as they were created, or you don‘t watch them.
If you don’t want to watch them then it’s perfectly fine and understandable, but if you do watch them then you know what the deal is. And you’ve accepted that deal despite your reservations about aspects of it.
The choice is yours.

Although basically a ‘civilised man discovers the jungle’ adventure flick with a love story tagged on, there are still quite a few moments that up the gore quota.
Away from the real animal bloodshed already covered above we have moments of fake violence like the aforementioned cannibalising of an unfortunate girl, various slit throats, tongue removals and limb hackings.
And it’s this (still pretty much now, though at the time truly startling) violence, gore and animal snuff footage, set against the beauty of the jungle, that were the then new and horrifying main elements that later Italian cannibal films would grasp onto.
But there are other basic ideas seen here for the first time that would influence the later films as well.
As it is the captured white man and the relationship between the outsider and the native girl (again Me Me Lai) would be the basis for the first true Italian Cannibal film, Deodato‘s “Jungle Holocaust”, as well as the gentle, haunting soundtrack (by Daniele Patucchi) to counter the ferocity of the visuals that would come to it’s masterful peak with Riz Ortolani’s score for Deodato’s grim masterpiece of the genre “Cannibal Holocaust”.

A big plus to the Euro Cannibal films was their use of actual jungle locations, and “Man from Deep River” certainly shows this off.
The stunning locations and crisp cinematography (by Daniele Patucchi, who would return to a rather different jungle 8 years later to lens “The Last Hunter”) ensures the film has a style and a gloss that belies it’s content and basically exploitation sensibilities.
And although, as mentioned, all of the classic era Italian Cannibal flicks benefited from such location filming, “Man From Deep River” looks especially striking.

And one of the most striking sights are the naked Asian female natives that fulfil all those essential needs for the discerning viewer.
As gorgeous, fully nude, lovelies sun themselves by the sparkling lake you can’t help but feel that possibly ending up as lunch is a risk worth taking to be able to cop an eyeful (and hopefully a handful) of such delicious sights.
The most delicious of course is Me Me Lai (here billed as ‘Lay‘), who would scratch out quite a place in Euro Cannibal history as she would appear again (twice more with Rassimov) in “Eaten Alive” and “Jungle Holocaust”.
Sporting a figure so perfect it makes your eyes water, she overcame the often limited roles to essay likeable native characters that were the bridge used to bring the white interloper closer to the natives.
And unlike her character in “Jungle Holocaust” where she came across as too clean and perfect given the deep jungle dwelling savage tribe she was meant to be part of, the obviously closer to civilisation, Asian tribe (rather too Extremely clean, crisp and colourful really) means she fits in rather better.

The sexual content is quite high as well and, the attack on the girl by the Cannibals aside, it’s certainly not a film where the sex is violent. Something that would become a regular aspect in later films, culminating in the graphic sexual violence seen in “Cannibal Holocaust”.
Here though it’s mostly Bradley and Marayå making love everywhere (they sure like variety these two, though I’m not sure I approve of screwing in the flour storage hut! Imagine swallowing a piece of those loafs) and Me Me Lai wiggles her behind most delightfully.
And you have to admire the way they pick a suitable Husband for Marayå by having her sit blindfold by a hole in the hut wall so she can be groped by the perspective grooms!

Ivan Rassimov (who ironically did very little in the later “Jungle Holocaust” where he utterly upstaged by Massimo Foschi) gives an excellent performance as Bradley and throws himself headfirst into the role.
And although not as utterly raw, open and uncompromising as the performance by Foschi in “Jungle Holocaust” (still perhaps the acting peak in the Cannibal cycle), he certainly pulls out the stops as he essays the mass of different emotions Bradley will go through, and have to come to terms with, as he moves from arrogant adventurer, to fearful captive, to tortured victim, to lover, to hunter.

I‘m not so sure about some of his dialogue though, at least in the English language dub.
Far out verbal outbursts include the classic “I’m a man not a fish!” and perhaps the most moving declaration of upcoming Fatherhood ever uttered, “It will be a boy! My little black savage”.
Actually the dialogue brings in an unusual ,for the market it was aiming for, aspect to the movie (and one that would not be carried on by other Cannibal films) which is that for most of its running time it’s actually a foreign language, subtitled flick! At least when you turn on the subtitles on the superb looking ‘Shriek Show’ DVD.
The natives all speak in (I presume) Thai, not English. Thus the film is given a nicely realistic edge and its extremely rare to see such a thing in what is basically an exploitation film that would play Grindhouse circuits and flea pits. The punters must have got a shock they weren’t expecting.
I sadly have no idea how this played on its cinema release and so can’t say if all prints were subtitled (I know not all DVD version are) but if not then the film would have been hard and perplexing going for the audience given the huge amount of Thai spoken.

So what do we have in “Man from Deep River”?
Well, we have a gorgeous looking, rather lyrical and at times even thoughtful (if rather sluggish) voyage of discovery into the jungle, with a heavy romantic angle to boot, that still manages to deliver the rather less than thoughtful and lyrical scenes of graphic violence and exploitation. Though the animal deaths will be a step too far for many.

But its also an historically important film from an Exploitation point of view that (although owing a debt to various earlier films) offered up many fascinating, controversial and unique for the time elements.
Many of these elements would later be resurrected (as the film started its slow but popular 2 year trek across the globe) to form the basis for the excellent “Jungle Holocaust”, which would itself spawn the rest of that infamous group of extreme movies that still remain as controversial today as they were when they first slashed across cinema screens.
It’s not the best of the Cannibal bunch for sure, though certainly not the worst, but it is perhaps the most vital.