Catherine Miles travels to the Amazon with her parents for her eighteenth birthday. During a boat trip, the girl's parents and guides are killed by a group of indigenous headhunters who assault the boat: the only one to be spared is Catherine, who is taken prisoner. Between tribal rituals, primitive practices, and the courtship of the indigenous man who cut off her parents' heads and now made her his personal slave, it will be very difficult for the girl to survive and get used to that life.
Unjustly mistreated everywhere, "White Slaves – Violence in the Amazon" has only one fault (if it can be called a fault) of representing too late the last gasp of a widely exploited genre that was already dead at that time. I am referring to the beloved/hated "Cannibal movie," a sub-genre of adventure horror that brought fortune to some of our authors and livened up the Italian genre cinema scene from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. In reality, "White Slaves – Violence in the Amazon" is not a full-fledged cannibal movie, as it lacks the main element of this type of film, namely the cannibals, but it can still be annexed to the genre for a whole series of characteristics typical of the genre. "White Slaves" has an exotic setting, a tribe of indigenous people who, at the right moment, know how to be repulsive (the food they eat and some healing practices) and ruthless (they are headhunters and punish adulterers), some documentary scenes showing animal fights, abundant nude scenes, and the classic moral that the civilized man is the true "uncivilized one."
It is said that initially Ruggero Deodato was called to direct this film (not surprisingly, in some countries of the world, such as Germany and Spain, it is known as "Cannibal Holocaust 2") who refused to dedicate himself to "Live Inferno," the fact is that "White Slaves" represents a beautiful example of an adventurous film infused with romance and gore, naturally keeping the principles of exploitation constantly in mind. The violent scenes, although present, are fewer both in number and in ferocity compared to many other representatives of the genre, the highest results are offered by the fierce practices of the tribe focused on the decapitation of enemies, but a cruel punishment is also staged against an unfaithful husband, whose face is made to be eaten by insects, and a defloration performed with a giant bamboo phallus. The closest relative of "White Slaves" is probably "The Country of Wild Sex," the first Italian foray into "Cannibal" by Umberto Lenzi, both for the absence of anthropophagi and for the more moderate violent dimension, but above all for the insertion of a love story as the fulcrum of the plot. There, a white man was captured and then fell in love with an indigenous woman; here, a woman ends up a prisoner and turns her hatred for the man who decapitated her parents into love. The troubled love story between the two is made sufficiently credible by the good construction of the characters, even if the beautiful slave is decidedly more credible than the too "patient" indigenous man.
The cast, as often happens for these films, is not the strong point, limited to the performance of a few professional actors, here led by a good but not exceptional Elvire Audray, known to the Italian public for having taken part in "Murder at the Etruscan Cemetery" by Martino and the cult "I'm Going to Live Alone" with Jerry Calà. Behind the camera, we find Mario Gariazzo ("The Possessed"), here with the pseudonym Roy Garrett; while the screenplay is signed by Franco Prosperi, the father of the "Mondo Movie." Suggestive music by Franco Campanino, although a bit too indebted to those signed by Ortolani for "Cannibal Holocaust."
In short, "White Slaves – Violence in the Amazon" is a pleasant adventure film that will certainly not disappoint fans of the "cannibal movie."
Curiosity. The Italian DVD of Gariazzo's film, distributed by Minerva-Rarovideo for the "Il cinema segreto italiano" collection, strangely has only the audio track in English.
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