Having recently seen several early black and white Carry On films I was rather disappointed with this later outing. The jokes were nearly all of a sexual nature; that wouldn't have been to bad if they had been funny; instead they were mostly fairly puerile. The story sees a group of English men and women; which includes Carry On regulars Sid James, Kenneth Connor and Joan Simms as well as Frankie Howard going to 'darkest Africa' accompanied by a blacked up Bernard Bresslaw as their native guide. Joan Simms is hoping to find some sign of her child who was lost in the area as a baby and it turns out he has grown up to become a loincloth wearing Terry Scott! He has never seen a woman before but quickly takes an interest in his mother's assistant June, played by Jacki Piper when he sees her having a swim. As the group travel through the jungle they have to contend with a tribe of cannibals and an all female tribe who intend to but the men to work
mating.
The story wasn't too bad and there were a few reasonable jokes; sadly they were buried in a flood of schoolboy humour. The cast did a good enough job with their limited material but I was rather uncomfortable seeing Bernard Bresslaw blacked up to play an African; surely in 1970 there were black actors in the country who could have played the part. In 'Carry On Follow that Camel' the creators managed to make a few sand dunes look like a desert but here the jungle never looked like anything other than a set; something not helped by the inclusion of a gorilla that was so obviously a man in a suit that you could see the actors white skin around the eyes! While this wasn't terrible it is certainly below par and I wouldn't advise anybody to go out of their way to see it; if it is on television and there is nothing better on it passes the time well enough though.
The story wasn't too bad and there were a few reasonable jokes; sadly they were buried in a flood of schoolboy humour. The cast did a good enough job with their limited material but I was rather uncomfortable seeing Bernard Bresslaw blacked up to play an African; surely in 1970 there were black actors in the country who could have played the part. In 'Carry On Follow that Camel' the creators managed to make a few sand dunes look like a desert but here the jungle never looked like anything other than a set; something not helped by the inclusion of a gorilla that was so obviously a man in a suit that you could see the actors white skin around the eyes! While this wasn't terrible it is certainly below par and I wouldn't advise anybody to go out of their way to see it; if it is on television and there is nothing better on it passes the time well enough though.