Carry On Up the Jungle (1970)

I love this movie so much

Just so...so bad

A Masterpiece!

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

When Mr Sidney James looks embarrassed by some of his lines you just know it's not going to be a good experience.Mr Terry Scott gives what is easily the worst performance in the canon,Miss Jacki Piper is bright and pert but has strayed in from an altogether classier movie.The sublime Miss Joan Sims is as ever head and shoulders above anyone else,a fact even more noticeable in the absence of Miss Hattie Jacques and Mr Kenneth Williams. "Carry on up the jungle" has a plot of sorts about the search for a rare bird led by white hunter Mr James and how the expedition comes across as a cut - price Tarzan (Mr Scott doing I'm not quite sure what but it doesn't resemble acting)who turns out to be Miss Sims' long - lost son. Mr Frankie Howerd and Mr Kenneth Connor are present in the flesh if not in the spirit and Mr B.Bresslaw only lacks a banjo to audition for the Black and White Minstrels. The men are kidnapped by a tribe of sex-starved women as you might well expect and my eyelids started drooping shortly after that. I am generally a huge admirer of the "Carry On" series which have provided me over the years with some of the best experiences(well,legal ones) I've had in a cinema,but some of them - to put it mildly - suck. And "Carry on up the jungle" sucks.

I have to admit before I started watching this I thought it was going to be two stars out of five, if I'm honest it looked like it might be terrible, but at three stars I can agree with that. Basically at the same time as Professor Inigo Tinkle (Frankie Howerd) is searching for the legendary Oozlum bird, Lady Evelyn Bagley (Joan Sims) joins an expedition in the jungles of Africa looking for her long lost son who disappeared as a baby. They are led by fearless hunter and also lovingly dirty minded Bill Boosey (Sid James) and his African guide Upsidaisi (Bernard Bresslaw), and also joining them are Tinkle's daft assistant Claude Chumley (Kenneth Connor) and Lady Bagley's almost unnoticed maidservant June (Jacki Piper). As the search for the son and the legendary bird goes on the trackers are constantly on the lookout for the animals and dangerous tribes people who roam the jungles. We also eventually find out that the jungle boy swinging around the vines, Ug (Terry Scott) is in fact Lady Bagley's son Cecil grown up, and falling in love and learning English from the now happy June. Soon enough the explorers are captured by a tribe called the Noshas, who are cannibals and plan to eat them all, but they are "rescued" by another tribe, the all beautiful bikini wearing women Lubby Dubby. They are taken to meet the leader of the tribe, and the only man they know living amongst them, Tonka the Great aka the long missing Walter Bagley (Charles Hawtrey), and hearing the tribe plan for all the men his wife Evelyn demands to be part of the leadership. Their plan for them is to have all the men, i.e. Boosey, Tinkle and Chumley perform their jobs every day until death, and that is to mate with the women, of course at first they are up for this because they are all beautiful, well, not all. In the end, after almost mating at last with beautiful women everyone is saved by Upsidaisi and his men, Tinkle gets his Oozlum bird which somehow disappears when returning home, and Ug and June live in their own hut house in the suburbs. Also starring The Spy Who Loved Me's Valerie Leon as Leda and Reuben Martin as Gorilla. I should be said that I can't see Barbara Windsor fitting into this film even I wanted her, anyway, this blatantly spoofs the Tarzan and The Jungle Book style films we have come to enjoy, and jam packed with innuendos, double entendres, slapstick and dialogue jokes, and sexy girls in not much clothing this is certainly comedy you will not dislike. Worth watching!

The African jungle, and Lady Bagley is part of an expedition to hopefully find her long lost son who disappeared years before, along with her thought to be dead husband. However this is no ordinary trip, Professor Tinkle is searching for the rare Oozalum bird and expedition leader William Boosey well and truly lives up to his surname. Not only are their problems in the camp, outside is numerous other dangers. Wild beasts, wild men and tribes unheard of by human ears before.1970 saw the Carry On team begin the decade with one of the better offerings in the franchise. Boosted by the returning Frankie Howerd and Terry Scott to join Messrs James, Hawtrey, Sims, Connor and Bresslaw, Carry On Up The Jungle sticks close to the cheeky formula that had worked in the better series entries previously (think Carry On Up The Kyber from 1968). Originally intended to be called Carry On Tarzan (the idea was scrapped for legal reasons), "Jungle" plonks a load of British odd balls in the jungle and invite us to observe how they cope. Which of course we know is not going to be very well at all. Terry Scott steals the film as a blundering Tarzan type (a role apparently turned down by Jim Dale), whilst Howerd and James get maximum humour from their polar opposite characters.With a simple plot and carrying the series innuendo trademarks on its snake bitten...ahem, Carry On Up the Jungle is a charmingly funny series entry. 7/10

Kind of a take on Tarzan films, this film stars a truncated version of the Carry On group, but it has Sid James, Joan Sims, Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Connor, Bernard Bresslaw, Frankie Howerd and Jacki Piper, so thats fine. Its basically the adventures of an African safari and the crazy things which happen, such as mingling with the animals, tribesmen and each other. The only person I would have liked to see is Kenneth Williams, as they could have written a part for someone scared of his own shadow and he would have been perfect for it. That said, the film is full of the usual innuendos that the Carry On films all have and this one is fun. Not the best in the series but still worth watching.