There's one startling shot in Tragic Jungle, (Netflix 2021) an instant of horror that sent a chill down my spine. Otherwise, there's not much to recommend in this well-made, if grim and predictable, little picture.
Workers are tapping trees for chicla, a sort of gum. Clambering up the trunks of vast Xarete trees, the men use machetes to hack funnel-shaped grooves in the bark and collect sap in bags tacked to the wood. Meanwhile on the other side of the river, two nurses are fleeing from a murderous bearded gent. One of the girls has jilted the man and he intends to murder her and those assisting her escape. Apparently, the film is set on the border between Mexico and what is now Belize, but a territory called British Honduras in the film -- I suppose this establishes the time in which the picture takes place, probably around the 'fifties. (There are several details in the picture that require elucidation via Wikipedia). The evil Anglo landowner guns down one of the nurses and her guide, both people who seem to be Caribbean-Africans, but not before the heroine (if that's what she can be called) sees her colleague having sex with their benefactor, the Afro-Caribbean guide. After the killings the girl stumbles off into the jungle where she collapses, only to be found by the 8 member crew of chiclet harvesters. One of the gum-sap guys rapes her; she later voluntarily has sex with the most handsome member of the crew. The gum-sap guys run into a camp of British gum-sap harvesters who are poaching on this part of the jungle, part of Mexico and under the control of a fearsome local Padrone who motivates his workers by staking them to trees for the ants to eat. The Mexican gum-sappers get into a shoot-out with the Brits and kill them all. This motivates the Mexican crew to decide to flee across the border, the Rio Hondo, with their chicla and the gum stolen from the dead Brits -- apparently, this is like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: the gum-sap collectors have a fortune in heavy, rubber blocks of the congealed goo. Unfortunately, their escape through the jungle goes awry. The men die one-by-one, probably due to the malign influence of the nurse who stirs up trouble between the boys although the jungle is also a hazardous workplace (no OSHA rules in effect in the Selva). full of crocodiles and jaguars. The bearded gent and his henchmen catch up with the few remaining gum-sappers and there's a shoot-out that leaves almost all of the Mexicans dead. The girl is nowhere to be seen. In the film's final shot, she emerges from the river and takes in her arms on of the two survivors of the gunfight, a very sick man who has been hauled through the forest on a stretcher and who may be delirious (Earlier the sick man's brother-in-law deserted him on the river bank, even though the dying man begged to be put out of his misery). She holds the man like a Pieta in her arms and, then, sinks back into the wide, featureless expanse of tropical river. The sole survivor, a squat, handsome little Mayan named Jacinto, is left to ponder the horrors of the situation.
Jacinto's point of view is privileged by a voice-over. He interprets the nurse, clad in supernatural white, as a Xtabay woman -- that is, a kind of dryad or spirit of the woods. Xtabay women are sexually voracious and they lure men to their deaths-- "you'll give your life 70 times over to touch an Xtabay woman," Jacinto explains. The film, directed by Yulene Olaizola, is weirdly misogynistic. The nurse who wreaks havoc on the gum-harvesters begins the movie as an innocent virgin. She doesn't seem that discomfited by the rape by the ugly boss gum-harvester -- while he's raping her, the Mayan crew sit by sharpening their machetes. Later, she seduces the most handsome of the chiclet harvesters resulting in the rapist murdering him out of jealousy. One guy falls out of a tree and is gruesomely devoured by a jaguar. Malevolent-looking howler monkeys roar overhead. A crocodile silently submerges itself in a swamp. (Whenever the characters are wading across lagoons, we expect the croc to make an appearance, but it doesn't -- later, when the Xtabay woman surfaces from the river and, then, gently drowns the dying man, she moves with the stealth of the reptile.) The film is handsomely shot with spectacular images of the rain forest -- the images are monochrome, tangles of green hanging over a green river. It's all grim, futile, and pointless. The message of the movie seems to be that you shouldn't mess around with supernatural Xtabay women, a moral that everyone can endorse. The problem is an ordinary girl can, apparently, be raped into becoming an Xtabay; maybe, even consensual sex, will create a monster of this sort. One of the men goes mad, running amuck when he is walking behind the nurse in her stained white uniform. Gazing at her derriere, the man notices to his horror that one of the woman's legs is a giant chicken leg with clawed foot. This is a genuinely scary image and one that startled me. There are obvious references to Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God -- we see a lone horse standing disconsolately on the edge of the river and a little raft, on which the horse is ferried across the stream, is all awash with water. The jungle seems like a forbidding place, inducing panic even in the Mayans who live there, and, I suppose, a secondary moral might be that it is a bad idea to wander around in the forest primeval.
(According to the Internet, Tragic Jungle is set in the 1920's. The story mirrors a Mayan myth about two sisters, one of them kind if promiscuous, the other cruel and chaste. When the kind sister dies, she is reincarnated in the cruel sister who becomes a forest spirit, the sexually lethal Xtabay woman. The gum-harvesters are called chicleros. The woman who directed the film, Yulene Olaizola, acknowledges her debt to Herzog, particularly with respect to the hardships of shooting in the rain forest. Chicle is a natural gum, produced by "bleeding" trees using the chevron-shaped machete cuts in the bark. Chicle, the word is Nahuatl but with a Mayan origin, is, indeed, used to make chewing gum -- this is its primary purpose. The gum has high sugar-content. Originally, the William Wrigley Company contracted with local padrone to harvest the gum in the jungles of Guatemala. However, the feudal system of gum harvest was abusive, as shown in the movie, and the practice ended in the sixties.)
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