Video Nasty #14: The man from deep river AKA Deep River Savages

Synopsis: John's living the colonial English man's dream. He's been accepted as warrior by a jungle tribe, he has a beautiful & permanently naked native wife and is the only one in the village who doesn't think throwing spears at helicopters is a good idea. Now he just has to meet the neighbours, a bunch of blood thirsty cannibals.

Deep River Savages is often credited as the first in a long run of italian produced cannibal movies, the people-eater prototype. Given this, it's surprising that the titular savages are actually on screen for less than five minutes, barely eating more than a bit of arm and breast. The film is really a soft-core mondo love story, with large helpings of real animal torture thrown in for cheap thrills.

After killing a man in self defence John charters a boat into deep jungle territory, using his day job as a photographer as cover for going on the run. After some reverie about the foggy streets of London and half a bottle of Jim Beam, John awakes to find his guide missing and some pissed off natives with spears. The tribe take him prisoner because, he believes, they have mistaken him for a fish ('I'm a man!, not a fish!').


Then follows 20 minutes of cruel and unusual rituals, including what I have now termed human piñata and blow-dart carousel. Once John has survived these unexplained rituals he is accepted in the tribe, destined to carry logs around for the remainder of the film for no notable reason. I think i'm right in assuming that most, if not all of the rituals in the films are made up by a naive westerner. Some, such as voodoo dolls, i'm sure are not attributable to asian tribes and others are just plain mad.

When a women's partner dies they seem to have a few ways to pick a new partner. The first is for the woman to have tag team sex with multiple men on her dead husband's ashes, presumably picking the one with the best moves. The second sees the woman sitting blindfolded in a room, deciding on her man according to who touches her up best through a hole in the wall. Naturally our hero John wins his women Maraya by not grabbing her boob like all the neanderthal tribe men, but instead stroking her arm. He's obviously playing the long game. Perv.

Other than the extraordinary way in which John 'wins' his woman, the remainder of the film is a plodding mediocre romance with lots of slow motion frolicking in the jungle. Maraya learns english surprisingly fast, especially considering John's rubbish definitions (a car is a box that makes a noise, apparently).


We only get to see the real savages in the last fifteen minutes of the film, eating one of John's tribe and then going on a rampage in their village. John manages to save Maraya, but she then dies after giving birth to his child, leaving John to turn his back on the western world (literally, he hides from a rescue helicopter) and to take charge of rebuilding the village. And that's it, the film ends with me looking a bit confused, expecting at least twenty more minutes of cannibal mayhem.

Cinematically Deep River Savages looks great, has a nice soundtrack and what we do see of the cannibals is fun. Unfortunately it's a painfully slow movie, which is a surprise considering the amount of torturous rituals and animal cruelty. I suspect that it began life as a soft-corn porn exploitation love story, but to get the horror crowd in the director added a bunch of shocking animal cruely and a few cannibals. Which is a shame, because without the cruelty and cannibalism I wouldn't of had to watch it.