The Carry On team send up the Tarzan tradition in great style. Lady Evelyn Bagley mounts an expedition to find her long-lost baby. Bill Boosey is the fearless hunter and guide. Prof. Tinkle is searching for the rare Oozalum bird. Everything is going swimmingly until a gorilla enters the camp, and then the party is captured by an all female tribe from Aphrodisia...
I'd be lion if I said I enjoyed this. Once again Carry On resorts to lazy racist humour and overt titillation to carry a film. We're it not for the presence of Frankie Howerd, I'd be rating this a lot lower. The thing with an expedition story is that it should give you opportunities to satirise the impact and ignorance of the British Empire. Even Call Me Bwana managed to mock the ingorance and arrogance of the west seven years earlier... as well as including overtly racist humour. One problems with Carry On Up the Jungle is that, yet again, the native population is depicted as the butt of the joke, with them depicted as superstitious, stupid and savage. For a film set somewhere warm, it moves at a glacial pace. In part, the pacing is due to the uneven plot. It would be natural in an expedition film, to expect challenges and obstacles for our characters to overcome. However, the first half is very much just a standard farce based around misunderstandings. With how cheap these f
