Jungle Trap (2016)
* (out of 4)
Five anthropologists ignore various warnings and traveling to a mysterious jungle on a mysterious island where they plan on getting back an item that was left there decades earlier. Once in the jungle they run across an even more mysterious hotel where they soon come under attack by the ghosts of some natives.
Director James Bryan will always be best remembered for DON'T GO IN THE WOODS but he made a number of interesting films throughout his career. This 2016 film is one that people are going to watch and think of it as a throwback to the 1990s when shot-on-video movies like this were everywhere. Well, this here was actually filmed in 1990 but the financing fell apart and it took until 2016 for a Kickstarter campaign to finish the product. A new score was added, it was edited together and here is the final result.
I've spent a lot of the year going through Bryan's work and I find him to be a rather fascinating filmmaker. Quite often I don't enjoy the movies but at the same time there's something about them where you can see the director's fingerprints. The same is true for this movie, which I really didn't like but at the same time there's no question that this is a film from Bryan. The new score perfectly suits the film and if you've seen his earlier work then you know how weird and distinctive the scores are. That holds true here so the score really makes this film as if you're watching a Bryan picture.
As far as the actual film goes, it's pretty much a cross between countless Italian cannibal pictures with THE SHINING thrown in for good measure. At just 72-minutes the film still drags quite badly as there's really not too much of a story and there's even less going on in front of the camera. The performances are pretty much what you'd expect from a film like this and it seems the budget was too low to get any memorable death scenes. I'd also argue that the entire story doesn't make too much sense but I guess that's to be expected.
