Jungle Jim - Savage Mutiny Film Review

This Jungle Jim film is the most horrifying of all. I felt a little sick watching it because it was so true. The most callous case of colonialism one can imagine. I wonder if audiences watching it back then in 1953 thought so. Hell, ten years later my school was conducting nuclear safety tests by getting under our desks. If only the 200,000 civilian dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had had desks to get under. The most horrific war crime in history. It is the Cold War and Jungle Jim is at the service of the Free World.

The film begins with Jim leading a raid on the headquarters of Commie agents and killing them all. Kind of violent for a Jungle Jim film. What did the kiddies think. The only good Red is a dead Red. Jim learns that the reason for this is that the US military wants to conduct Project X - an atomic bomb test on a nearby island. But, Jungle Jim says, there are natives living there. Yes, it is your job to make them move to the mainland. It is only temporary and they can move back in a few weeks. Well, actually in about 100 years. The US carried out 105 nuclear tests in the South Pacific around the Marshall Islands and they are still radioactive today and people are still getting sick from it. Were we really so ignorant back then or did we just not give a damn. The reason given is to study the effect of radiation on plant life. Not sure but we know how it affected Kaiju!

Two Commie agents were not at the hq. and are doing what they can to sabotage the mission. First trying to keep the villagers on the island so that the test would have to be postponed and then to get them back on the island when the bomb was on its way to make America look bad. Jim of course thwarts them. A lot of action in this one - a couple fights against the agents, a roll on the ground with a black panther and a one on one duel against one of the natives. In the end they turn around as the bomb is dropped - a huge mushroom cloud and the American soldier says to Jim who asks will we have to do this again "Not right away. But at other times and other places. Wherever free men seek to find the weapons of peace". Egads.