Introduction: The Jungle Ate My Genre
By 1988, the Italian cannibal film genre was about as lively as a piranha-bitten leg floating down the Amazon. Natura Contro — known variously as The Green Inferno and with shameless audacity as Cannibal Holocaust II — was its death rattle. Directed by Antonio Climati, a man who once built his career on mondo shockumentaries, this was his swan song, the cinematic equivalent of an elderly uncle insisting he can still do the limbo at the family reunion and promptly breaking a hip.
The distributors slapped “Cannibal Holocaust II” on it, presumably figuring audiences wouldn’t notice or care that it had no cannibals, no holocaust, and certainly no sequel-worthy ideas. The result? A film that feels less like an adventure and more like watching mosquitoes breed in real time.
The Plot: Monkey Business and Monkeying Around
The story is so thin it could be floss. A group of friends — Jemma, Mark, Fred, and Pete — head into the Amazon to find a lost professor and a legendary tribe. Naturally, hijinks ensue. And by hijinks, I mean scenes so bizarre they seem designed by committee after a six-pack of warm beer.
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A monkey resuscitation. Pete, the trumpet-wielding sidekick, saves a monkey’s life. Why? Because apparently CPR for primates was the heartstring moment we were missing.
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The anus ray incident. One poor guide gets an electric eel up his backside. Yes, that’s in the movie. Yes, it’s played completely straight. Yes, it’s more shocking than anything else in the film.
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Escalating monkey hunts. Our heroes spend a chunk of runtime darting monkeys to please a shady dealer named Don Pedro. Cannibal films used to satirize colonial exploitation. This one is basically National Geographic if the interns were drunk.
Instead of cannibals, we get gold prospectors, organ-smuggling child traffickers, and a fisherman who tries to assault Jemma when he’s not busy catching anacondas. It’s like the filmmakers dumped every pulp trope into a stew and forgot to add spice — or logic.
Jemma and the Boys: A Bland Adventure Club
The leads are so indistinct they might as well be mannequins airlifted into the Amazon.
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Jemma (May Deseligny) is our intrepid journalist, though her investigative technique mostly involves shrieking “Professor!” into the jungle until someone answers.
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Pete (Pio Maria Federici) is both a doctor and a trumpeter — because nothing says jungle survival like brass instruments.
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Mark and Fred (played by real-life brothers Mario and Fabrizio Merlo) exist primarily to water ski barefoot down the Amazon while dragging children out of rivers. If you always wanted your cannibal movie to look like a Marlboro ad, congratulations.
When they’re not being captured, slapped around, or humiliated by tribes, they’re betraying each other. By the finale, Jemma and the professor abandon their companions and fly away to claim glory for “discovering” a tribe that doesn’t even exist. Betrayal never looked so boring.
The Action: National Geographic Meets Benny Hill
If you thought Cannibal Holocaust was shocking, Natura Contro is shocking in the opposite way — in how dull it manages to be despite everything happening onscreen.
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Animal cruelty light. The film indulges in a few real monkey deaths, because of course it does — Italian cannibal cinema rarely met a monkey it couldn’t shoot. But it’s all presented with the flat affect of a nature documentary, robbing the cruelty of even its exploitative punch.
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Child trafficking subplot. Yes, there’s a band of smugglers who kidnap children for organ harvesting. Yes, it’s handled with the subtlety of a Saturday morning cartoon villain monologue.
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Jungle slapstick. Ant torture, snake threats, plane-towed canoes — it’s less horror, more Gilligan’s Island: Blood Diamond Edition.
By the time the heroes storm the gold prospectors’ camp, you don’t care who wins. You just hope someone remembered to bring bug spray.
The Style: Mondo Without the Mondo
Antonio Climati made his bones in the mondo genre — those shockumentaries that promised “forbidden rituals” and usually delivered staged scenes of tribal nudity. Here, he applies the same faux-documentary eye to a fictional plot. The result? Endless travelogue shots of the Amazon, filler footage of canoes gliding down rivers, and lingering close-ups of parrots looking confused.
The soundtrack is cheerful when it shouldn’t be, somber when it has no reason to be, and absent when you wish it would drown out the dialogue. The editing is choppy, as though the film were cut together on a bumpy canoe ride.
The Alleged Message: Against Nature, Against Entertainment
The Italian title Natura Contro translates to “Against Nature,” which feels apt because the movie is against pacing, against tension, and very much against holding an audience’s attention. Some scholars tried to read it as a meditation on colonial exploitation. Others suggested it was an ecological parable. I’d suggest it’s simply a cinematic prank: a cannibal movie without cannibals, a horror movie without horror, and an adventure movie where the greatest peril is an eel making an unscheduled entrance.
The Ending: A Twist No One Cared About
When our heroes finally reach the so-called Island of the Imas, they discover two things:
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The gold prospectors have already slaughtered most of the tribe.
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The Imas tribe never actually existed.
Professor Korenz, the supposed holy grail of their quest, has gone full “adopted by natives” mode. Jemma and the professor steal the plane, abandon their comrades, and return years later to pick them up like forgotten luggage. Pete narrates everyone’s fates in a cheery epilogue, as though we’d spent the last 100 minutes watching an after-school special instead of the supposed sequel to Cannibal Holocaust.
Why It Ended the Cannibal Genre
If Cannibal Holocaust was the nuclear blast that defined the genre, Natura Contro was the last puff of smoke rising from the crater. It lacked gore, shock, or even basic narrative drive. Released in 1988, it was like showing up to a funeral five years late with a kazoo.
Audiences stayed away, critics shrugged, and the Italian cannibal cycle — already starved of ideas — finally died in the jungle where it had begun. The distributors’ desperate rebranding as Cannibal Holocaust II only underlined the creative bankruptcy.
Final Verdict: A Jungle of Nothing
Natura Contro is not the worst film ever made. That would at least make it memorable. Instead, it’s a cinematic mosquito bite — irritating, forgettable, and slightly itchy when you think about it too long.
The film promises cannibals but gives us monkeys, organ smugglers, and aquatic rectal electrocution. It promises horror but delivers travelogue. It promises adventure but hands us an inflight magazine of jungle clichés.
And yet, in a strange way, it deserves credit. It killed the cannibal genre, sparing us more animal cruelty and faux-tribal nonsense. For that alone, we should salute Antonio Climati. His last film is the cinematic equivalent of turning off the lights when you leave the room: polite, necessary, and completely uninspired.
