Original title: Primitif
This oddity from director Sisworo Gautama, who later made the much interesting Jaka Sembung/The Warrior (1981) and Pengabdi Setan/Satan’s Slave (1982) among others, is an Indonesian knock-off of the Italian cannibal films of the 70s and early 80s, particularly Umberto Lenzi’s Il paese del sesso selvaggio/Deep River Savages/Man from Deep River (1972) and Ruggero Deodato’s Ultimo mondo cannibal/Cannibal/Jungle Holocaust (1976). And it plumbs all the depths that the most reprehensible Italian originals had already explored – animal cruelty, gore, racism, though surprisingly no nudity – then adds a stolen soundtrack to keep you on your toes.
After a man is pursued through the jungle by a cannibal tribe and put to death, the title sequence – at least that on the German version that is most widely available these days – sends the cameras wandering around the undergrowth to the incongruous strains of We Are the Robots by German electro-pop pioneers Kraftwerk. Could there be a less suitable piece of music to kick off a jungle-set cannibalism film? The main plot kicks off with three anthropology students – Rika (Enny Haryono), Robert (Barry Prima) and Tommy (Johann Mardjono) – joining guide Bisma (Rukman Herman) on an expedition to study a primitive but essentially peaceful tribe. The group want to press on further into the jungle to study another tribe, but Bisma is reluctant, only agreeing to help them when they bribe him. Inevitably, the bamboo raft they’re travelling on runs aground, separating Rita and Robert from Tommy and Bisma. Rita and Robert are captured by a tribe of cave-dwelling cannibals – she’s tied to a rock, he’s imprisoned in a bamboo cage – while Bisma is killed and an increasingly frazzled Tommy wanders about the jungle looking for help. If you’ve seen either of the aforementioned Italian films, you won’t have much trouble working out the route that Savage Terror ends up taking…
Gautama doesn’t waste much time in turning stomachs – an early moment of grossness involves a witch doctor trying to lick a scabrous growth from a woman’s leg – but he’s not averse to that other standby of the cannibal film, long stretches where not a great deal happens. In Savage Terror, there’s an inordinate amount of the mid-section with no dialogue, just people mooching about in a wooden cage, the cave-dwelling tribe tormenting a clearly distressed and angry orangutang (the animal is supposed to be killed but it clearly isn’t, it’s death happening off camera but the ape’s anguish is very upsetting) and Tommy runs across all manner of grainy stock footage of animals being unpleasant to each other – a Komodo dragon is swallowed whole by an anaconda and an alligator snatches an unwary jaguar from the banks of a river.
Elsewhere, there appears to be some specially-shot-for-the-occasion violence meted out to animals. Though the tribe – badly bewigged and very likely comfortable city dwellers paid as extras for the day – are supposed to be eating the animals (and it does look like the actors really are indulging, with some gusto it must be said, in the innards of alligator) and said tribespeople make animal noises in a manner that suggests all kinds of racist undertones that are hard to ignore. The Italian films were often called out for their racist representation of the indigenous peoples it portrayed but there’s something even more unpleasant about the way the tribe is represented here.
There are moments of madness that lighten the mood a little. Amid the swirl of synthesizer cues stolen from Kraftwerk albums there’s the startling sound of a synth reworking of John Williams’ main title theme from Star Wars (1977) that appears out of nowhere (copyright infringement really wasn’t top of Gautama’s concerns when it came to making Savage Terror.) And during the climactic escape, the tribesman’s boomerang axe (its use ends exactly how you fear it might) is a moment of inexplicable, head-scratching silliness.
But the racism and the animal cruelty make this a gruelling watch and it’s not like you’re rewarded with anything particularly interesting at the end. It’s a slavish retread of the Italian model, cheaply made, with very little to recommend it. Barry Prima has his fans – thanks to The Warrior – and completists might want to track it down but otherwise it’s worth avoiding.
Savage Terror was released in the UK on home video in 1982 by Go, the label that was at the forefront of the “video nasties” debacle of the early 1980s – its button-pressing sleeve for the Italian “Naziploitation” film Lager SSadis kastrat kommandatur/SS Experiment Camp (1976) was instrumental in attracting much unwanted attention to the number of violent films surfacing on VHS at the time. Given the Director of Public Prosecutions and British Board of Film Censor’s aversion to video cannibalism at the time, it was inevitable that Savage Terror would fall foul of the hysteria – it never made the list of prosecuted titles but was added to the so-called “Section 3” list, titles that couldn’t be prosecuted for obscenity but were still liable to seizure and confiscation. Although it was later released on blu-ray by the American company Severin (an earlier DVD release as part of a double bill with Godfrey Ho’s Diamond Ninja Force/Ghost Ninja (1986) issued under the umbrella title Tales of Voodoo, Vol. 2 is so awful as to be unwatchable – which may be a small mercy for some), it has never been re-released in any format in the UK.
The EOFFTV Review 