bkoganbing Sabu like so many Hollywood stars was looking toward television as his career salvation. Jungle Hell is patchwork type of feature film edited from some episodes of an unreleased television series.Possibly had we seen the full episodes they might have been entertaining enough. Judging from what I have seen the series was no better or worse than say Sheena or Ramar Of The Jungle. Television was a tad slow in catching on to public tastes. They were still making stories in a Hollywood like jungle when filmgoers were seeing the real deal starting with The African Queen and King Solomon's Mines.Sabu plays Sabu an eager young lad who wants to learn the ways of the west to help his people. Doctors David Bruce and later K.T. Stevens are interested in a 'burning rock' that the natives venerate. In the 50s no need to spell out radioactivity. White hunter George E. Stone has some nefarious purposes of his own for the rock and others like it.The episodes were cobbled together so you have to fill in a lot with your imagination. Might have made an interesting TV series though as this was shot in Sabu's native Mysore and the footage of the village life was the best part of the film.

keith-moyes-656-481491 ubik-11 and lemon_magic are pretty much spot-on in their description of this weird non-movie.There sure are a lot of elephants.It has been suggested that this movie was compiled from episodes of an unsold TV show, bulked out with stock footage. I find this hard to believe. Many of the newly-filmed scenes are merely setting up the stock footage. Take them out and there is barely enough left to fill a single 30 minute TV slot.I wanted a copy of this movie to help complete my collection of Fifties SF movies (it's that flying saucer at the end that makes it qualify). If you have a similar obsession, I must sound a warning.I bought Jungle Hell on a DVD double-bill with another Sabu movie - Savage Drums. Unusually for these obscure B movies, the print is nearly pristine. As I ground my way through the tedium at least I could enjoy the quality of the image. Finally I arrived at the astonishing ending.Only to find it wasn't there!Clearly, some versions of the movie had it and some didn't. This one didn't. I could live with that except that the DVD packaging clearly advertises the flying saucer.I was robbed.

lemon_magic This is one of those weird, airless viewing experiences where the editors tried to pretend they could construct a watchable movie out of a whole bunch of stock footage inter-cut with shots of actors on a sound stage "reacting" to the stock footage, along with a bunch of expository dialog...and a narration delivered with all the emphasis of a 10th grade ESL student reading a passage phonetically without any comprehension of what he is actually saying.Somewhere in here is a beloin-clothed Indian actor named "Sabu" who supposedly "stars" in the movie, even though he doesn't actually appear in it for long stretches, or at all in climax or in the last 10 minutes. (I think that's supposed to be his voice doing the opening and closing narration, but it's hard to tell, because along with all the other problems with this movie, it's very poorly miked and mixed.) He's not bad, or at least he's not unwatchable, but it's hard to imagine why someone thought they could base a film (or a TV show) around him.The plot is a weird combination of stock footage of elephants (LOTS and LOTS of elephants!), radioactive rocks, plane crashes (or stock footage of plane crashes), crudely animated flying saucers and did I mention stock footage of elephants? LOTS of stock footage of elephants. Oh yeah, somewhere in there one of the big cats kills a crocodile and a guy who I think is supposed to be the villain because he has a dapper mustache and wants the radioactive rocks for himself instead of for science. I think.Without all the elephant footage and all the dangling plot threads that the screenplay brings up without bothering to really answer, I think the movie would be about 25 or 30 minutes, and it wouldn't be too bad. Not great, but no worse than a typical Jungle Jim adventure from the same era.As it is, the movie gives me a giant case of mental dyspepsia.I hope Sabu went on to bigger and better things, and I hope that the elephants lived happily ever after...and I hope I never have to watch this mess again.

ubik-11 I can't believe there's any stock footage of elephants anywhere that I haven't seen now. It's all in this movie. I mean *all*. "Jungle Hell" isn't a descriptive title by any means. "Elephant Hell" might be better. This is where bad elephants go when they die. This movie contains more stock footage than any movie I've seen - even more than "Devil Monster".Here's the plot. Dr. Paul Morrison works alone in a small village in the middle of the Indian jungle. For some reason he has running water and electricity in his office. Doc's buddy Sabu (a grown man in a diaper-like loincloth) believes in his modern medicine, which creates some conflict with the local medicine man, Shankar. When Morrison cures a local boy of what appears to be radiation burns (all it takes is a little salve), he cables London for some help investigating the source of the burns. A Dr. Ames comes to his aid and *gasp* she's a woman!Once this awkwardness is sorted out - she's pretty good-natured about it - Morrison gives her some spare women's clothes he has lying around. She lost hers in a plane crash, but why does bachelor Morrison have women's clothes in the first place? Then they're off in search of the "burning rocks" that may or may not be uranium ore. That's not really how radiation works, but it's just a Sabu movie so I guess it's close enough. Dr. Ames lost her scientific instruments in the crash along with her clothes, but they show up again when they finally find some more rocks. Oops.Another explorer wants to find the rocks as well, but only for the potential profit. A friend of Shankar's helps him in exchange for a bag of gold. A mysterious and poorly drawn flying saucer seems to have something to do with the rocks, which are buried beneath trees. Both groups battle wild animals while they do their best to avoid the myriad elephants in the neighborhood. I have to admit the stock footage of the tiger jumping into the water and killing the crocodile was pretty cool. I didn't know they did that.SPOILERSNothing gets resolved, and the movie ends the way it began - with Sabu narrating against a backdrop of stock footage of crowded mother India. He reveals that Morrison and Ames get married, that the flying saucer was controlling the tiger and the elephants, that its mysterious beings were using the Earth as "incubating grounds", and that to wonder why is "distraction". The End.Wait. Did he say "distraction" or "destruction"? His accent is kind of thick, so I'm not really sure. I played it a couple times and couldn't figure out which it was. Either way, it's rather bewildering. If they weren't able to show the ending, at least they could've written a better one for Sabu to read. I don't get it.Now, if they had replaced the elephants with dinosaurs this would've been a movie to reckon with!