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Jungle Heat (1984)

Dir: Jobic Wong

The War is ending and the Americans are pulling out, as such the latest supply convoy (with Vietnamese drivers) won’t have an American escort when it heads out into the jungle where bands of Vietcong rebels wait to pounce.
The American camp commander refuses to tell the Vietnamese the truth and after just 3 weeks training, under a Lt. Gordon (a dubbed over Sam “Flash Gordon” Jones) in a “Dirty Dozen“ style bonding fest,
they are sent off into the jungle.

Sure enough it all goes wrong and the men, under the command of Captain Nguyen, fall into the hands of the Vietcong and their sadistic leader (Hong Kong flick regular Mui Sang Fan), and with these sadists as your captors…the dead are those to be envied.
Soon vile tortures are being carried out on the men and it becomes a lottery on who will live or die. Will anyone even survive to fight back? We better hope so or else it’s going to be a short movie…

 

This Hong Kong excursion into the popular ‘Nam sub-genre owes more to the likes of “Cannibal Mercenary” than “Platoon” and as such is full of trashy violence and bloodletting which become basically the only reasons to watch.

In typical Asian style animals are used pretty much as inanimate props and as such snakes are wantonly chucked around and in one scene a real rat is hyped up, set on fire, and let loose in a bizarre game of ‘Flaming Rat Roulette’ that even Christopher Walken would balk at!
The real rat is later replaced by a model rat pulled along on a wire, but the initial burning of the live rodent is pretty nasty.

Violence is frequent and in your face but is ragged in presentation due to some seriously ugly editing and print damage (at least in this, mostly uncut, grey market DVD release on the ‘Moonstone’ label. A German DVD release is meant to be much better, but is pretty hard to find and far more expensive).
The action scenes are just as ragged as everything else but at least quite a few vehicles are used to bulk the visuals up and many explosions are forthcoming as men run around like headless chickens blasting away with wild abandon. And occasionally they even hit something!

The movie itself though (away from the state of the print) does indeed look like it has undergone some extensive (and badly done) editing, as incidents seem to happen with little build-up and then get forgotten, characters are introduced then discarded (including a white female captive who appears from nowhere only to vanish again, though this may be censorship) and many expected linking sequences, to move us logically from one event to another, seem to be missing.
Perhaps it is the dubbed dialogue as well that is to blame. In the film’s most infamous scene one of the Vietnamese is being punished for supposedly trying to escape (according to the dialogue heard) and yet they have literally only just been captured and we saw nothing of this supposed escape at all.

This aforementioned punishment (which brings us nicely to the juicy bits) involves acid being poured into the scalp wound of the man, who is buried in the ground up to his neck, resulting in a grossly unexpected result that must be unique in cinematic lore. And if the FX are crude and rather unconvincing the basic idea is so damn crazy and cruel it makes up for it.

We also have some messy bullet hits, cut throats, a sawed-open stomach, skull bashing, beatings, limb chopping and legs set on fire. All done with gusto and all showcased as if they were the be all and end all so far as reasons to watch the movie are concerned. As in fact they are of course!

We do have a couple of (unintentionally) entertaining reasons to watch though. It’s fun to see the, continually slumping ever since “Flash Gordon”, Sam Jones doing basically nothing as far as the meat of the action is concerned and then getting badly dubbed over just to add insult to injury.
It’s always nice to hear stolen, sorry I mean ‘borrowed’, soundtracks that rarely match the on-screen action and for bad movie junkies the general dialogue (more often than not screamed out via the laughably bad dubbing) at least contains plenty of manic melodrama, generally silly lines and clunky pearls of wisdom like, “You men treat things in a totally different way from what we women do”.

Despite the relatively fast pace of the movie the story momentum is actually lost due to the fact the film seems to hop back and forth all over the place with little or no basic cinematic discipline and structure.
First our Vietnamese heroes are in the Jungle with the war on, then they are out of the jungle for a few disjointed adventures in the city, then they are back in the jungle with the war now over (which actually makes no difference anyway), suddenly we’re back in the city again and then eventually we’re all back in the jungle for the big showdown before we leave the jungle behind once again for the overblown ending .
And you can’t help but think that , as events unfold, these guys are either the stupidest or the unluckiest soldiers in all of ‘Nam. Or maybe both as it turns out!

The finale (with the help of the ludicrous dialogue and dubbing) is laughable in it’s melodramatic hysteria and badly edited structure and it helps ensure that “Jungle Heat” remains the trashy, generally very bad, flick it started out as.
But it has just enough silly moments, jaw droppingly crazy events, laughable dialogue (as well as that essential nasty violence and bloodshed of course) to warrant at least one viewing by any Trash movie fan.