Bowanga Bowanga / Wild Women Of Wongo / Virgin Sacrifice

REVIEW
Whew. The fine exploitation cinema archivists at Something Weird Video have unleashed some brain-damaging compilation DVD's in the past, but this crackpot collection of three cheesy cheesecake low-budget "jungle women" exploitation endeavors from the 1950s just might be the 3 a.m. insanity inducer to end them all. Luxuriate in the Los Angeles and Florida caves and parks that pass for the African and South American jungle terrain of these leopard-print loincloth-clad female savages, and as the threadbare cinematic tedium of all 197 minutes ticks by, allow your mind to wander (believe me, you won't have a choice), and ponder this riddle: just what is the appeal of the "primitive woman" subgenre anyway? Male masochism fantasy of submission to a dominating female aggressor? Or crude misogynist identification of women as inherently primitive, unenlightened beings? Whatever the warped male rationale may be, these films have proven perversely pervasive over the decades - from Italian farces like When Women Had Tails to the Raquel Welch vehicle One Million Years B.C. - and the trio on display here is not without some moth-eaten charm.

Bowanga Bowanga has to be one of the cheapest-looking films ever made, an hour-long (at least a quarter of which must be battered travelogue stock footage), sub-Ed Wood B-movie potboiler about three men enslaved by the "white sirens of Africa." Still, it's hard to retain much animosity for a film which closes with an impromptu and inept musical interlude.
The middle entry, Wild Women of Wongo, is the best of the bunch (not exactly a crowning achievement), a colorful and campy saga of two warring prehistoric tribes who want to switch their prospective mates with those from the opposing camp.
Virgin Sacrifice is the most slickly photographed of the trio; alas, it's also a perfect cure for insomnia. Virgin is the only film of the group to contain even fleeting nudity or overt eroticism, and in general, these films make the still tame nudist camp films that would shortly follow look like hardcore porn. Watching old exploitation movies often leaves a contemporary viewer confounded as to what was even being exploited, and one would be hard pressed to think of better representations of this pleasurable confusion than this trio of titles. Recommended for die-hard cine-masochists.