There are only three reasons that a movie should be titled "Welcome to the Jungle": (1) It's a documentary about the rise and fall of Guns 'N' Roses (2) It's a movie starring Axel Rose and/or Slash (3) It's a cannibalism movie about people from the "civilized" world going into a jungle and the title was changed because some slime licking studio exec decided the original title of "Cannibals" wasn't flashy enough to sell the flick. If you're a sweet child of the '80s and you're hoping for doors one or two, you're shit out of luck because we're giving you what's the curtain. Oh, and look, it's George Kennedy sodomizing a donkey while chickens peck kernels of corn from his naked ass. ZONK!

In 1961, Michael Rockefeller (“Rock a feller”? I don't even wanna touch a feller, let alone one! *rimshot*) went missing in New Guinea while doing some follow-up research on a tribe called the Asmat. A boat that Mikey and his partner on the trip, René Wassing, were on was overturned and the two stayed with the boat while their guides swam off to get help. Tired of waiting, Rockefeller decided to swim off himself to get help but was never heard from again, while Wassing was saved the day following. Son to vice-president-to-be Nelson Rockefeller, the search for Michael went on for three years before he was finally declared dead in '64, though his body was never found. 40+ years later, in Fiji, college girly surfer friends Bijou and Mandi (a pair of Aussies) hook up for a little reunion. Mandi's 2-week boyfriend Colby (an American) sets up Bij with his buddy Mikey (another American, of the "pig-headed drunken frat boy" family) and the four decide to head into New Guinea in search of a 70-year-old white guy who may or may not be Michael Rockefeller according to their helicopter pilot friend. If it is Mr. R, the crew plans to do an interview with the old man and sell it to a tabloid for a million bucks so they can buy solid gold sports cars and a lifetime supply of Jack Daniels.

After engaging in the popular New Guinea "Xtreme sport" of almost getting carjacked, the quartet find the local guide who claims to have seen Grandpa Rockefeller and picked up the man's monogrammed Zippo, which the crew trades him a bag of tobacco for. Bijou thinks that the natives may be smarter than they're giving them credit for and they may very well be setting themselves up for a trap. Meanwhile, Michael's frat boy "tough guy" attitude is really starting to piss me off as he picks fights with everybody they run into and doesn't know how to try and be realistic by not acting. Is it really so hard for people to just be normal when a camera's around?!

While out in the jungle, the crew runs into a missionary couple (the religious kind, not the sexual position) for an awkward and seemingly pointless scene. If those two don't wind up impaled on stakes and castrated later on, I'm going to be very disappointed. Speaking of which, if Mikey and Bijou do get eaten, the natives are gonna get so wasted off their whiskey soaked meat. And if they don't get eaten after making me hate their stupid pathetic alcoholic shit-for-brains asses, this movie immediately gets 1/2 star no matter what happens for the rest of the flick. Seriously, we're half-way through the movie and if Colby and Mandi don't just leave these two a-holes out in the middle of fucking nowhere to be eaten alive, I'm seriously considering shutting this shit off. On the plus side though, this movie has given me the great idea that, should I ever decide to kill the two most irritating fuckers I've ever met, I'll invite them out into the middle of nowhere where no one will ever find the bodies...

Eventually Mister and Missus Drunkerton make a raft and break off on their own down river. Sadly, since there are two cameras, we're have the fuckhead couple shoved in our face for a while until they run into pissed off natives and drop their handheld during their inevitably violent and torturous deaths. By that point though, the lethal exposure to the toxic twins will have long killed any and all redemption that might've been brought on by their deaths. They're like a cancer: even though the chemo might get rid of them, you're still emotionally and mentally ravaged by their existence. Once they're gone though, it's back to Colby and Mandi with the second camera as we follow their whiney search for their braindead cohorts. On the plus side, the whiney stuff isn't nearly as long or as insanely infuriating as the drunken posturing and mouthing off.

Will Mandi and Colby find Michael Rockefeller, let alone make it out of the jungle alive? Or, will there be some kind of epilogue tacked onto the end to explain how the "footage" made it back to civilization when they didn't? And even if they do make it out alive, what other shit will the writers put in there to fill out the rest of the running time? Truth be told, I'm not even 100% sure of what the fuck I saw right before the credits rolled... and by that point, all I really cared about was that the credits were finally rolling, so fuck it, it's an ending and that's all that matters.

Shot in pseudo-documentary style ala The Blair Witch Project (only in digital, because it's cheaper and makes more sense), it's hard to tell whether Welcome to the Jungle is supposed to be an homage to Cannibal Holocaust or just an attempt to make a mainstream cash-in on a flick that most "normal" people have never heard of. Obviously Dimension wasn't too impressed with it, considering the flick went straight to DVD as part of their "Dimension Extreme" label, who also brought us the half-way decent Black Sheep recently. Considering the lack of explicit gore, vulgar rape sequences, National Geographic style native junk, and disturbingly haunting and almost surreal score, I'm assuming it's just a standard "buy low, sell high" cash-in effort by writer-director Jon Hensleigh, who's written for everything from Jumanji to Die Hard With A Vengeance and also took up both chores for the 2004 version of The Punisher. There are a couple of moments where the graphic special effects are actually done pretty damn well, but the inane dialogue and my general hatred for half the cast (compared to my moderately steeped dislike of the other half) just served as a black hole, sucking in any enjoyment I might've had from the rest of the flick. If Cannibal Holocaust is too much for you to handle, but you're still interested in the "raw footage" motif of a cannibal hunting movie and you can get past nerve wearing characters, you might be up for a viewing of Welcome to the Jungle. As for me, well, I'd say it's pretty friggin' obvious how I feel about the whole craptacular debacle. Adieu!