Mixed Tape Movies: Welcome to the jungle

In the eighties it was the-thing-to-do to make a mixed tape (like an mp3 but touchable, always in need of a pencil and definitely cooler). On it you would make a little playlist of all the cool songs. Now the trick was to make each song correspond with the rest of the tape. In this post I will try to do the same with movies.

Every once in a while I will select a general topic and select movies to accompany it. As you can see the more child-friendly movies are at the start of the day, but  when night falls: ‘here be monsters’. Please feel free to give suggestions of other unknown movies.

One rule though: Auteur themes like ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘James Bond’ are not allowed. ‘Spy-movies’, naturally, are.

Theme: Welcome to the jungle.

I’ve never been to the jungle. I’ve never handled a machete to carve my way through the bush. But, talking about movies I do know one thing: jungles are always adventures. Now I kept away from Indiana Jones (not a lot of jungles in those movies) or King Kong just to keep things interesting. So put on your raincoat and grab your knife because you are going into the green!

08:00-10:00

The jungle book: The classic. Forget about the various live-action remakes. This Jungle Book is the only one that matters (though I thought the Netflix version was rather good as well). It has everything a good Disney has to offer: brave heroes, dastardly villains and a good heart at its core.

10:00-12:00 

Jungle 2 jungle: The idea is simple: New York is called a ‘jungle’. So; why not take a real jungle kid there. And so the story was born. However, leave it up to Disney to get a sweet tale out of it.

12:00-14:00

George of the jungle: I love this little rage in the ‘90s when (lesser known) pop-culture items were made into big movies (Dennis the Menace, Mr. Magoo and the Stupids being the others I enjoyed). ‘George’ is hilarious all the way (even the sequel). I don’t know why really but it has a heart and it has George slinging his vine into a tree every three minutes so I’m happy.

14:00-16:00

Tarzan: Phil Collins wrote some of his best songs for this movie (though Jesus he knows me is still the best) which, as it turned out, caused the whole ordeal known as The emperor’s new groove (watch the fascinating documentary The sweatbox). Still this movie stands as one of the best ‘new wave’ Disney animations. The last moment in time in which the studio wasn’t afraid to show some real terror.

16:00-17:00

Romancing the stone: A love story at its core. This movie has everything, thick jungle plants, swinging vines, drug smugglers, crooked bridges, hungry alligators and -of course- ‘Pepe’. This movie is 80s adventure to the max and so enjoyable.

17:00-19:00

Medicine man: Sean Connery is terrible at accepting scripts (he turned down the role of Gandalf and his tailor-suited role in Skyfall). But when he accepts a script he gives his all. Here he plays the man curing cancer in a movie troubled by terrible voice-overs. But still, with Connery on the job you can only marvel.

19:00-21:00

The emerald forest: A boy gets lost in the jungle. The father (after grieving) continues his job at the local dam. The boy returns and father and son reunited over the destruction of the villainous, environmentally dangerous, dam.

This is the story in a nutshell but, strangely enough, it works. Moreover, it tells you that movies in the 80s were a lot more preoccupied by making the world a better place than they are now.

21:00-23:00

The secret of the Incas' empire: Now, I had a blank to fill. I haven’t been able to re-see this movie for over twenty years (yes, I’m that old). So my review is based on memory and thus biased.

What did I like about this movie when I was a child? It was bloody bloody! It had a nice Indiana Jones kinda fibe to it, and it ended happily within a guy swinging a vine above a pit of lave yelling: “I’m not bloody Indiana Jones!” to his girlfriend in need of rescue.

If I can ever refind it on youtube I will write a full article about it. For now accept this movie as an Italian rip-off of the Indiana Jones-franchise and have fun with it, because that’s what it had with it, a lot of fun whilst waiting for Indiana Jones 4…oh sh*t.

23:00-01:00

Anaconda: Forget Snakes on a plane. Just focus on one big bloody snake –meters long. This snake has every intention of eating each and every explorer trying to find it. Luckily the movie knows that that’s not enough to keep an audience invested so it toys around the genre. Basically Anaconda is a dark comedy. And if you see it as such (with some beers) it becomes hilarious.

01:00-03:00  

Predator: The official ‘rumble in the jungle’. An intergalactic hunter versus our own ‘Dutch’ Arnold Schwarzenegger (the guy is so impressive he never had to change his name). The interesting thing is the amount of blood this movie allows. This is ‘Arnie’ at his finest. All of it taking place in the tropical jungle.

Honourable mentions:

Tropic Thunder: A fun genre movie that pokes fun at the cinema industry. And that's the point, it's more about the movie-business than it is about the jungle.