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.

Lady Street Fighter (1981)

 

Director: James Bryan

Screenplay: Renee Harmon

Cast: Jody McCrea as Rick Pollard; Renee Harmon as Linda Allen

Ephemeral Waves

Includes a review for Revenge of Lady Street Fighter (1990)

 

I like knives. I can do all sorts of exciting and interesting things with them.

Approaching Lady Street Fighter, be aware of what this is, an ultra low budget film clearly wanting to follow, least in name, the wave of action films of the seventies, the title clearly evoking the likes of The Street Fighter (1974) with Sonny Chiba. The acting wavers in style, the martial arts is performed not by trained fighters, and the film's lead is Renee Harmon, an older woman whose presence as the ultimate badass and sex object is sometimes accidentally challenged by the plot itself she wrote. Sometimes it is unintentionally humorous or weird that, yes, Harmon does lick a yellow telephone receiver to denote her horniness for the male lead over the phone.

The story of Lady Street Fighter off-camera is compelling and adds to the narrative, of a German war bride who encountered director James Bryan, whose most well known film is the video nasty slasher Don't Go In the Woods (1981), and as her own one woman producer-director-creator worked with Bryan over multiple films, her Bryan her muse as much as the other way around who together made low budget genre films. That she made herself central in them would, if she was a male creator, be dismissed as hubris, though here there is a delight in Harmon as a woman doing so for herself whilst creating films this curious like Lady Street Fighter. The MacGuffin of this film, whose narrative becomes vague at times, is a master file on microfilm of all the members of an assassin's guild, possibly hidden in a plush stuffed dog. Harmon as Linda is caught between Assassins Incorporated and a member of the FBI uncover between their midst who she falls for, with the added tension that her sister was killed and she wants to find the cause of this. In centre stage, Harmon is idiosyncratic with her distinct accent and acting style, and this is a rare case, as the producer, you cheer her on as selling herself as the action star and the most beautiful woman on the Earth because this is a woman, who worked and worked over multiple films, and at least committed to these films on and off-camera. Honestly, considering the many men who did so in straight-to-video and exploitation era cinema, someone like Harmon deserves even mild vanity, especially as between her and Bryan, this is a film clearly built from duck tape and dreams that managed to be inspiring and entertaining.

Certainly as an exploitation film, they threw the kitchen sink in. There is a verisimilitude for how everything feels real even if they have to work around their limitations - that real cars are used even if fast cranking is clearly used in a couple of car chases, that these are still shot in real locations and that even the orgy sequence has numerous extras who stand out. That the film even has personality in its set dressing and locations is a delight, even in some of its more idiosyncratic decisions like locations and decor which evoke religious iconography, filming in what feels like a rundown church or the inexplicable but distinct aesthetic of French magazines in picture frames on the wall of one bedroom. The time period, clearly made in the cusp of the seventies even if into the eighties, is captured as much as a time capsule as this is an entertaining romp, between witnessing a go-go strip club where Liz Renay manages to cameo¹, to the sight of a Van Halen t-shirt (of their first album). Even that little detail leads is worn from one of the most entertaining extras I have seen in cinema for a while - part of a trio of a guy with the t-shirt and his possible girlfriend, the later a dog collar on to be walked on as a submissive, who meet a nerdy guy; after the bespectacled guy is nervous after being passed the lease, he finds himself almost chummy with the pair in a silent little narrative, the trio sat together happily even when the murder mystery game at the orgy they rocked up at turns into an actual murder.

There is absurdity mixed with scenes which are awesome in their own way, the absurdity intentionally and not really unsurprising when James Bryan's infamous Don't Go In the Woods, a more acquired taste of slasher film, had a lot of ridiculous moments which sometimes felt intentional, such the film continually cutting to a man pushing himself up a giant woodland hill in a wheelchair only to be decapitated when he gets to the top. Here Harmon also gets to be awesome and does so in a way, as the creative voice, which is inspired at least, when she knocks a car off a cliff with hers, than drops a lit cigarette down on the male assailant's petrol strewn wreck, when he screams like an Austin Powers henchman that he cannot move his legs and there being gas all around off-screen, with the cherry on top the middle finger he presents in his dying breath which is on fire back at her. Awesome and funny moments like this contrast a film which thankfully has few dated aspects, the only one of real note being the adult daughter of Max Diamond, a businessman who has assassin connections, being depicted in terms of a person with severe learning difficulties, like a five year old, with a complete lack of grace. Most of the film is thankfully sillier than tasteless.

Even in mind of how much female nudity this has, it always comes in mind the most distinct artistic influence alongside Bryan is Renee Harmon herself. Her character, varying between confidence but occasionally the character being lost in (accidental) weakness at moments, is meant to be the most gorgeous person on Earth and, whilst she hides her figure, she is still doing nudity herself even if not from the front, whilst still proudly cavorting in an almost white knitwear whole body stocking on a bed in erotic ecstasy for one scene. It does not feel she is being told to, but that Harmon throughout, even with the leering creepy villains lusting over her, is pushing for this erotic aura around herself, and honestly a little vanity here is completely acceptable with utmost charm. That it comes with unintentional aspects, such as Ramon constantly sucking on celery seductively, always coming with her drinks, adds an absurdity which contrasts the purely exploitative aspects, such as the death of her sister involving an actress topless in an opening torture sequence.

Lady Street Fighter's sense of cheek and fun is found even in touches like casting Trace Carradine, the most elusive of the Carradine family tree, from the lineage from John Carradine to David Carradine, in that he may not actually exist and the actor who plays him is only in this one film. It is a movies that plays to the tropes that were being used to sell films at this point in cinem,a - sex, action, car chases - and in context for the ultra cult fan it succeeds just as an idea of anyone making a film like it. The quirks are there too, even in the aspects you would not find in another film such as a gratuitous scene of feet licking or the seductive stroking of champagne for blatant symbolism. The lacksidasical attitude to event too, where the plot itself is the vaguest of MacGuffin, and an orgy can inexplicably have a trio of men in their own toga party edited in, adds to this when, if you are not put off by the presentation of the film, a viewer can feel greater emotional connection, and joy from this for its absurdities.

This type of movie is of course an acquired taste. The "sequel" Revenge of Lady Street Fighter would in another context by indefensible. Whilst it has some new footage, with the initial set up being of an older Linda targeted for trying to delivery her memoires to a younger woman (Ruth Peebles), the moment Peebles is kidnapped leads to the sequel playing all the footage from the prequel, some in opposite order but 90% in its original order only intercut between Peebles being tied to a chair in a room as a procession of men read of the original film in documents to her. It is a really weird attempt to sell the original film again, but it was not that rare at times for a viewer to be trapped in such a scenario if they bought a film, sequels which turn out to just replay the original film's footage. The Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise infamously did this, and this is something I can attest to from experience when, rather than the original Boogeyman II (1983), the most common version of Ulli Lommel's sequel to his 1980 horror film on second hand DVD was inexplicably a re-cut, with him talking directly to the screen in new footage, as a character recounting the first film as footage of the first Boogeyman film played. I never finished that version back when I go to the second hand DVD and was tricked like this, never knowing if footage from the original sequel was on there.

Renee Harmon and James Bryan did this a bit, but whilst Run, Coyote Run (1987) is beheld as truly surreal, crow barring in new footage with her acting students in roles with footage, spliced mid-scene, from any film of hers before, Revenge of Lady Street Fighter would be an irritant. I do not look down on it, merely a curious remix which I cannot hate; instead, I merely find it the curious and amusingly weird cherry to a film I like. It befits a work from this history of cinema that, despite their budgets, they push themselves to provide more bang for their buck, whose limitations are compensated by someone like you trying. Renee Harmon even sacrificing her husband's car, without telling him, to be pushed down a cliff for one shot, and whilst I wished to have been a fly on a wall for that marriage conversation afterwards, it compensates for any sequel made after which just repeats the footage from the scene and the entire prequel entirely. This is a film build from devotion and sheer passion, even if a little eccentric in the best ways.  

 

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1) In a really interesting crossing of paths, a person like Liz Renay with such a fascinating story to look into makes a cameo happily stripping on camera here. At this point, the former Las Vegas showgirl had been the girlfriend of mobster Mickey Cohen, starring in sexploitation films in the sixties, starred in John Water's Desperate Living (1977), and in 1974 was arrested after running naked down Hollywood Boulevard only to be acquitted by a jury at the trial. It is truly in these little moments, and little cameos, where you can find really fun and fascinating real life figures, and she lived and made films/wrote memoirs until her 2007 passing.