1441. Cannibal Women In The Avocado Jungle Of Death (1989)

Starring: Shannon Tweed, Bill Maher, Karen M. Waldron

Director: J.F. Lawton

Running Time: 90 mins

Cannibal Women In The Avocado Jungle Of Death is an American film about a professor of feminist studies who is sent on a mission to negotiate with the man-eating piranha women of the avocado jungle following the news that the US avocado supply is running out.

To be honest, I don’t know what more I was expecting from a film with a title like this. Fortunately, it’s not a totally trudging mess, with a few flickers of clever satire, but for the most part, it’s a dull, drawn-out and unfunny parody that doesn’t provide anywhere near as much entertainment as its insane title.

Evidently, this is a pretty awful film, but there are a select few moments that saved it from being the absolute worst. A major ‘theme’ of Cannibal Women In The Avocado Jungle Of Death is radical feminism and sexism. On the one hand, you’ve got the piranha women representing those who want to dominate (and in the case of this film, devour) men, whilst there’s a dinosaurish man accompanying our main hero on the voyage into the jungle who’s always spurting out some demeaning phrase or other.

At times, the way in which the film pokes fun at these phenomena is pretty entertaining. There are a few scenes with a couple of hearty chuckles, and they’re backed up by a pretty intelligent satire, which was good to see.

However, when the only good thing about your film is one or two laughs, it doesn’t hide the biggest problems. In the case of Cannibal Women In The Avocado Jungle Of Death, the story is all over the place. For one, the pacing is appalling, and we spend almost as much time with a bizarre male tribe as we do with the titular cannibal women, and even when we do finally get to the main event (about 60 minutes in), it’s a painfully stale and dull finale that never provides the sort of ridiculous laughs you’d expect.

As it’s a comedy, you can make light of a lot of the story issues, but when it comes to the majority of the humour, it just doesn’t work. Yes, there are those few good moments of satire, but apart from that, I didn’t laugh once. A possible reason for that is that the film is so bizarre out of the gate, straight from the title, that everything afterwards feels a little lacklustre.

When you’ve got a US military general complaining about the lack of avocado supply only ten minutes into the movie, you’d expect some pretty zany antics to keep upping the ante, but it just never comes, and leaves the film as a consistently disappointing watch that’s just never funny nor simply entertaining as it needs to be, and that’s why I’m giving Cannibal Women In The Avocado Jungle Of Death (I love that title) a 3.2.