Diamonds of Kilimandjaro (1983)

Diamonds of Kilimandjaro: Directed by Jesús Franco, Olivier Mathot. With Katja Bienert, Antonio Mayans, Aline Mess, Albino Graziani. A group of adventurers head to a primitive tribe in Africa to find a treasure of diamonds and a beautiful white girl who was lost years ago and was made the tribe’s goddess.

“A group of adventurers travel to the u0026#39;dark continentu0026#39; to try and locate a lost heiress named Diana, who disappeared years before in a plane crash, and who is now believed to be living with a savage tribe that consider her to be their goddess.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eOnce again, my search for sleazy, European cannibal movies has taken me deep into Jess Franco territory—a seemingly endless cinematic wilderness swarming with sub-par scriptwriting, crawling with crap camera-work, and abundant with awful acting (Franco regular Lina Romay taking the prize this time for her pitiful performance as an ailing, elderly woman). It is here, in this hellish place, that I finally stumbled upon Diamonds of Kilimanjaro, an abysmal jungle-based exploitationer so stupefyingly bad that it took me three successive evenings to finish watching it.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eTawdry and unrelentingly dull, even by Francou0026#39;s standards, this wearisome piece of trash fails on almost every level: the story is a dreadfully dull derivative of Edgar Rice Burroughu0026#39;s Tarzan, albeit with a feminine twist; the film appears to have been filmed in the local botanical gardens, although grainy stock footage is poorly integrated into the film in a pointless effort to convince viewers that the action is really taking place in Africa; and the death scenes are virtually bloodless (Franco can usually be relied upon for some splatter, but despite initial appearances, this isnu0026#39;t a cannibal movie and it isnu0026#39;t that gory).u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eWhere the director does succeed, however, is in his casting of sexy young Katja Bienert as jungle jail-bait Diana. Running and leaping through the undergrowth in nothing but a skimpy loin-cloth, her curvaceous bod belying the fact that she was only sixteen at the time, this nubile beauty makes quite an impression. Franco also throws in some further nudity courtesy of Mari Carmen Nieto as treacherous traveller Lita (who gives us a glimpse of her untamed regions), and Aline Mess as topless warrior woman Noba, thus narrowly avoiding getting yet another rating of 1/10 from me (although Iu0026#39;m sure heu0026#39;ll be receiving plenty more in the future—I have loads of his films yet to see).”