White Slave [Schiave bianche: violenza in Amazzonia] (1985)
AKA Amazonia: The Catherine Miles Story, Cannibal Holocaust 2: The Catherine Miles Story, Forest Slave
Starring Elvire Audray, Will Gonzales, Dick Campbell, Andrea Coppola, Dick Marshall, Alma Vernon, Grace Williams, Sara Fleszer, Mark Cannon
Directed by Mario Gariazzo (as Roy Garrett)
Expectations: Very low.
On the general scale:
On the B-movie scale:
It’s always great when a movie completely surpasses your expectations. White Slave looked like a dumb, low-budget exploitation movie from its poster; its tagline promising some sort of sexual exploitation as well as the “savages vs. civilized white people” stuff that many jungle movies trade in. But White Slave is actually a pretty damn good movie. It’s not great, and it has a lot of issues, but overall I really enjoyed it.
That enjoyment really came down to the storytelling. The basic story is simple and something of a known quantity: a nubile, 18-year-old blonde girl is captured by some headhunters, stripped of her clothes and forced to live as one of their own. It’s like The Searchers, but focused on the captive instead of the ones trying to rescue her… and there’s no one trying to rescue young Catherine Miles.