5/10
SHAME OF THE JUNGLE (Picha and Boris Szulzinger, 1975) **
11 December 2008
I was first intrigued by this via a still in "The Movie", an early 1980s British film periodical, where it was mentioned in an entry dedicated to animation; I also recall my father renting it on VHS – under its U.K. title of JUNGLE BURGER – in the mid-1980s but, of course, I was too young to be allowed to watch this or even understand it. The edition I acquired had the benefit of the English-dubbed soundtrack (with the hero, spoofing the popular character of Tarzan, voiced by Johnny Weissmuller Jr.[!] – son of the screen's most famous "Ape Man" – and the participation of many a "Saturday Night Live" exponent) but I opted to watch the original French version (accompanied by Italian rather than English subtitles).

Anyway, while the film is moderately amusing, it's in no way a classic (falling far below the standard of even contemporary artist/film-maker Ralph Bakshi); incidentally, it exhibits a similar predilection for explicit violence and sexuality (indeed it's swamped by the latter, particularly during the second half, with the hero depicted as impotent and where both characters and landscape are shaped like male and female genitalia)! The villainess, then, is a bald lady with fourteen breasts (perhaps a nod to the then-latest Bond adventure THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN [1974] – speaking of cinematic references, there's an obscure one involving the maligned but not-too-bad religious epic THE SILVER CHALICE [1954], which I watched for the first time only last month): she's flanked by a mad scientist with two heads who, typically for such evil "Siamese twins" caricatures, are constantly quarrelling among themselves.
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