Jungle Trap (1990/2016)

Director: James Bryan

Screenplay: James Bryan and Renee Harmon

Cast: Renee Harmon as Dr. Chris Carpenter; Frank Neuhaus as Dr. Josh Carpenter; Heidi Ahn as Betsy; Tim de Haas as Jobe Ortega; Valerie Smith as Janice; Rhonda Collier as Rita; Glen Sarabian as Mark; Linda DiNardo as Bena; Bill Luce as John; Jan Vanderberg as Obie DuBois; Bette Bena as Madame Trudea

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

We return to planet Renee Harmon, the figure that collaborated with filmmaker James Bryan numerous times since they encountered each other, Harmon her own personal voice in the independent films they made. This however has a fascinating back-story, and comes into the issue of how cinema in general like all art forms has a history of unfinished and partially destroyed fragments. Those films which never came to be, or finally did as we will get too, happen to anyone and with James Bryan, there were a few. One such project was Horror Con (1989), a slasher film set around an aforementioned horror convention, which never came to be and is merely a fragment. American Genre Film Archive preserved this fragment, and it has connection to the subject of this review: actors like Heidi Ahn and Obie DuBois returned for Jungle Trap, as did the conventional poster too. Jungle Trap itself however has a much bigger and even more elaborate tale, which was a whole film brought together and finished thanks to another group called Bleeding Skull.

Bleeding Skull was a website founded by Joseph A. Ziemba in 2004. It became the growing ode to independent and niche filmmaking, as the no-budget was admired, the homemade loved and as a site named after a type of novelty candle, it presented its reviews without irony, which accepted the silliness of these titles, their accidental joys, as much as sincerely appreciated how bloody hard making a film actually was. They would collaborate with American Genre Film Archive from 2018¹, and among the projects AGFA would pick up was a project Bleeding Skull had already released through a Mondo Video collaboration, taking a film they had discovered unfinished and finished off. They became fascinated with Renee Harmon, the German war bride who immigrated to the USA with her husband, trying her hand with cinema with self financed work where she was centre stage. Her frequent collaborated, as mentioned, was director James Bryan who would find admirers in Bleeding Skull, to the point they got to look at his archived materials. Alongside finding one production Run Coyote Run (1987), a bizarre re-mixing of footage from multiple films together found in a car boot², they found too a shot-on-video jungle horror adventure Bryan made with Harmon but never finished. Thus Jungle Trap, technically a 1990 film but officially completed and premiered in 2016, came for revenge. Even Joseph A. Ziemba and Annie Choi, novelist and a later member of Bleeding Skull, put their efforts in as, having a band named Taken by Savages together, they acquired time appropriate synthesizers and scored the film with the apt soundtrack for the mood. Jungle Trap was first a release Bleeding Skull distributed through their deal with Mondo Video, a brief collaboration of VHS releases of obscurities like Heavy Metal Massacre (1989), only for most of them to slowly be reacquired by AGFA in the time passed.

Jungle Trap is probably one of the more easy sells to anyone to the world of Renee Harmon too, as when you get to films re-using footage from Lady Street Fighter (1981) as she and Bryan did by the mid-eighties, things get weird even for my standards. It is still an acquired taste, but it has enough to entice someone with its curious home-grown nature, about a haunted hotel in the jungles and head hunters, all clearly shot in someone's backyard. This is its own world. Pre-existing footage, from action films or documentary footage of deforestation in the Amazon, is weaved into static new footage following Dr. Chris Carpenter (Harmon) and a group of archaeology institute members going into the forests after a rare artefact. It emphasises an admirable homemade quality where, to stage a train cart dialogue sequence, you redress a room as one and have the extras play appropriate locals as much as they can, alongside with when the jungle is staged onscreen with a lot of plants, "Jose Diaz for Greenery" the credited person to thank for the production design. A scene in a plane involves splicing pre-existing footage of one in the air against a cramped homemade box of a set, whilst staging a car crash means between existing footage and newer material, though they still have a fire stunt even if in the foreground of the car needed to be put out once cut was uttered.

I have to raise the obvious. I like old jungle adventure tale aesthetics, but be it film or video game, we have the issue of it coming from white expansion into third world countries and the problem, here with white actors playing head hunters who decapitate and preserve heads, that they are usually using symbology racially loaded to demonise non-white cultures. Jungle Trap is a goofy film, so I will not damn it, but just bare this in mind as this was clearly riffing on old jungle adventure movies which by themselves had these problems openly with them and this is merely a spin on. It is to the film's credit, whilst it plays to the sinister head hunters, one of its key points to the plot is how it is about white civilisation trying to force that tribe to leave their land, killing them off, and building a hotel on their remains, so credit to the film it is about the sins of colonisation in a shot-on-video cult work.

Thankfully, as well, Jungle Trap instead decided to riff on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) on a budget, and the power of video effects editing, so most of this is negated once you get into the jungle, actors playing staff of a hotel in the middle of a forest that was seemingly abandoned. With these hotel figures vanishing in an edit, or turning into head hunters, reality is distorted and it settles for this for the rest of the plot. Alongside a troupe of idiosyncratic cast members, from Renee Harmon's acting style to an occasionally seen drunk pilot, or Jan Vanderberg stealing scenes as the grinning older Hotel Bell Captain with his brightly ominous comments, you can also add soap opera to the proceedings. In-between a member secretly on the side of the tribe holding the skull artefact they are after to the backstabbing - Harmon's lead and the male leader are a divorcing couple, he dating a significantly younger woman (Heidi Ahn) - this provides a curious turn for a film with already a lot of curious touches. Genre is more interesting, as no budget shows here, when it ingests curious little plot contrasts like this.

Jungle Trap, as a result, does feel ambitious. In context, this is James Bryan having to work on lower resources, but it is more elaborate than a few shot-on-video productions from this era. Certainly next to Run Coyote Run, a mind bender but one by this point from Harmon and Bryan recontextualizing old Renee Harmon film footage, this is ambitious in trying to limit this and having to make a film almost entirely with new footage. It is one that is incredibly entertaining even to the point there is clearly two moments where the cast break character and find humour in the moment without breaking the fourth wall, which is sweet. This is before you take into account the rebuilding of the film by Bleeding Skull. Fans of this type of cinema, they edited together the footage with James Bryan for a film which, in context, is slick in comparison to some of the more padded, rambling and haphazard work that is loved too. The music is a huge virtue, with droning synth from the era that stands out in mood from Taken by Savages, with a little bit of nineties techno in there as well. This proves in itself the danger of losing this if the technology cannot be recreated over time, particularly as the love for scores like this or to John Carpenter having a second career as a musician proves that a specific sound to these synthesizers from older horror films was distinct to other electronic instruments from the decades after.

Jungle Trap is a curiosity, and it delights to see this managed to get a British premiere in 2022 from 101 Films. In the early days of DVD here, we got some surprising stuff from niche labels to the 2010s in the shot-on-video and shot-on-standard-digital formats, but retrospective releases were going to have an issue with a sustainable market in Britain especially as the cost of having these films going through the British Board of Film Classification, mandatory by our laws, is always going to prohibit a healthy access to niche cinema as in other genres and areas. It is, with this, amusing and great we did get titles like this arrive when they do, and on high definition of all things, alongside the greater ease in seeing these films online allowing a widening audience for this area of cinema that the likes of Bleeding Skull in the USA have helped with. It is telling what kind of film Jungle Trap is when at the end, despite there being death and betrayal, a lot of off-screen and prop severed heads involved, it ends on Renee Harmon and another cast member being happy and able to laugh on a bright day. That sense of entertainment and joy in these films is felt by this film's finale, with the story of even this film coming to life through Bryan and Bleeding Skull after two decades in itself a happy conclusion.

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1) Bleeding Skull's About Us page.

2) Bleeding Skull's page for the Mondo Video release of Run Coyote Run (BSV-003), written by Joseph A. Ziemba and published November 28th 2014.