On the back cover of the video of `Jules Verne's 800 Leagues Down the Amazon,' you can read the following tagline - `From the Creator of the Fantasty (sic) classics, "Around the World in 80 Days" and "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"; the fact is, it is from the king of B-movie Roger Corman (as executive producer), and Luis Llosa, director of much better `Anaconda.' The difference is that this cheaply made film has no Vincent Price or man-eating CGI creatures, and this boring tale based on one of Jules Verne's books is not even campy.
Barry Bostwick is Garral, rich and respected plantation owner in Brazil. When his daughter Minha (Daphne Zuniga) got engaged to a clean and nice doctor Manoel (Tom Verica), Garral, wrongly accused and outlawed, decides to go down the river with them in order to attend their wedding ceremony, after building a huge, house-like raft floating on the Amazon, on which they can travel to the city of Manaos. But a wily bounty hunter Koja (Adam Baldwin) keeps the secret of Garral, and waits patiently for a chance to use it.
From the beginning the film suffers from the clueless direction and low budget. In other words, the film always looks cheap. The alligators in the water (obviously provoked by someone standing out of the range of the camera) are not fearful or terrifying, and their attacks are at best growling and biting the wood. But all the characters somehow keep crying and screaming all the time when a bullet in the head can settle it. Oh, and piranhas? Well, I saw them twice, for about ten seconds.
The dialogues are so banal and insipid that they are sleep-inducing, and there is no acting from the actors. But they should not be blamed. What can you expect from the director of `The Specialist,' in which showy pyrotechnic is more impressive than two highly-paid stars?
The film proudly calls itself `Jules Verne's' but it hardly deserves the name of the writer. You need better ideas than the hostile `natives' running around half naked, a Chinese servant played by a Japanese actor, or a secret code that can be solved by pointing a gun at someone's head. Avoid it.
There is a Mexican film `La Jangada' (1959) based on the same novel (but I haven't seen it).
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