SKIN EATING JUNGLE VAMPIRES
DVD. Chemical Burn.

It’s likely that, with a title like Skin Eating Jungle Vampires, most viewers won’t come to this film with high expectations of quality film-making. It’s quite an achievement, then, for the film to still be worse than you could possibly have imagined. But it is.

Seemingly thrown together at random, it opens with a entertainingly cheesy shot of Violet Sweet jiggling her way through the jungles of Costa Rica, but then goes downhill rapidly, as she is attacked by a bunch of female tribal vampires, who corpse throughout and don’t seem to know quite what to do. Back in America, Sweet’s sister Carla Anderson bangs on and on about their psychic connection and how she is worried that something bad has happened to her, and so hops on a plane to Costa Rica to…erm… spend most of her time swimming and lazing around on the beach. Eventually, she remembers that she is supposed to be looking for her missing sister, and eventually winds up joing her as a captive of the jungle vampires, who are in fact aliens from the planet Clitoria, trapped on earth until their god can be given a virgin bride.

It takes a lot for a film that has extensive footage of topless girls rubbing each other in gore to be boring, but sadly, that’s exactly what this shoddy effort is. Shot on cheap and nasty video equipment, it fails on more or less every level. I’m assuming it’s supposed to be camp and trashy, but it has not of the entertainment value, intentional or otherwise, that you’d find in low budget sleaze. Dialogue seems to be thrown in as an afterthought (half of Anderson’s performance is literally phoned in as she offers voice over comments on the ‘action’), the acting is terrible, continuity all over the place, editing and camerawork haphazard and the music awful. There isn’t enough nudity to make this worthwhile as a T&A cheesefest, and the gore effects are dreadful. As for star, producer and self-proclaimed legend Mr Creepo – well, I’d never heard of him before seeing this, and I have no real urge to track down his other work (which is previewed on this disc, and looks equally tedious).

It’s notable that at the end of the film, outtakes are presented with the words “and now for some fun” – tacit acceptance that the preceding film was anything but. One to avoid.

DAVID FLINT

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