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A Fire on the Amazon (1993)
SPOILERS:
Fire on the Amazon is a cheapozoid Roger Corman flick
about the disappearing rainforest. The film is only 75 minutes long,
and about half of it is a complete digression from the main story!
A famous indigenous environmentalist is killed.
Although it is obvious that the money interests wanted him out of
the way, the murder is performed with an arrow to feign an Indian
attack, and the local police somehow arrest a taciturn Indian who
"hangs himself" in his cell after signing a full confession. When
his fellow tribesmen come for his body, a local North American
environmentalist (Sandra Bullock) and a magazine reporter from the
States (Craig Sheffer) try to talk to them, but they are
unresponsive. On the spur of the moment, the Americans follow the
Indians up the river to their reservation.
Pause. Let's think about that. Sheffer and Bullock
see the Indians paddling upstream, so they just decide to commandeer
a canoe and follow. They don't know the terrain, they don't know how
far they will be traveling, they have no supplies - not even insect
repellant, and they're in a stolen canoe paddling through the
unfamiliar jungle, surrounded by crocs, snakes, the greedy bad guys,
stone age tribesmen, and probably O.J. looking for the real killer.
Not to mention the owner of the canoe.
Check. That all makes sense so far.
And that was the sensible part of the movie!
Soon thereafter, the reporter is shot by an
unknown assailant and the canoe overturns, so the two adventurers
just decide to saunter through the Amazon rainforest in a random
direction, even though night is approaching, they are soaking wet,
and one of them has a gunshot wound. Well, as luck would have it,
they are captured by indigenous people. The sojourn in the native
village is the thirty minute digression I spoke of earlier. During
this time, the confusing plot simply grinds to a halt so that the
Americans can exchange cultural enlightenment with the villagers and
bodily fluids with one another. Fortunately for the helpless
Americans, their kidnappers are not real natives but movie natives,
and therefore live in harmony with the nature spirits and possess
the wisdom of their ancestors, including secret herbs that cure the
wound, and more secret herbs that make Sandra Bullock want to make
nice-nice for hours with the reporter (whom she had previously
detested). These native guys have enough secret herbs and spices to
open up their own fast food chain. Furthermore, they have more
advanced forensic medicine than Quincy and CSI put together. They
perform an autopsy on the guy who "hanged himself," and are able to
conclude that he was dead before the hanging, killed by Colonel
Mustard, in the conservatory, with a lead pipe.
The search is then on for Colonel Mustard, but the
lovebirds are still under the spell of those secret herbs and
spices, so they are constantly sneaking a quick feel on the dirt
roads, and playing kissy-face in sleazy taverns filled with
environmental terrorists and competitors in the Anthony Quinn
look-alike contest. All of this romance is pursued with the same
nonchalance you'd have with your best girly on the streets of
London.
So what happens in the story?
Oh, yeah.
This must take the award for the most abrupt
deus ex machina ending ever. After their investigation pisses
off everyone in South America, Bullock and Sheffer are pursued by
about a zillion heavily armed bad guys, including all possible
corrupt local authorities with Pancho Villa moustaches. The two
lovebirds are finally trapped on a dock, lacking a boat, and facing
a horde of approaching baddies. Their predicament includes machine
guns in their faces, water at their backs, and no place left to run
- with only a minute left in the film's running time ...
How can Pauline escape this Peril?
The reporter's buddy, a guy we saw for only a
minute in the opening scene, suddenly arrives from the sky in a seaplane to
rescue our lovebirds at the last second!
Unfortunately, Bullock had been severely wounded during their
escape and dies from her wounds, but not before making a tearful
deathbed environmental speech on the plane, after which some informative word
slides tell us how much of the rainforest is lost each year.
OK, the concept was poor, I'll give you that, but
it was genius compared to the execution. The production values are
abysmal. The photographic quality is about equal to your dad's home
movies, and the sound track is both inappropriate and cheesy. In
other words, director Luis Llosa defied the odds by taking a bad script and
making it worse! His career was not over
however. Before returning to Peru to produce TV programs, Llosa would go on to make two more
Hollywood classics: Anaconda
and The Specialist. IMDb ratings:
The amazing thing about that short list is the time sequence,
which tells an incredible story: Llosa made an
incoherent, amateurish film like Fire on the Amazon, therefore
inspiring some producers to
bankroll him with $45 million to helm a film with Sharon Stone, James
Woods, and Sly Stallone! The results of that decision didn't work
out too poorly for the investors, but the quality of the film was predictably
bad. As we noted in
our review, The Specialist may be the career nadir for
everyone involved with it except, of course, for Llosa, since it
would be almost impossible to sink lower than Fire on the Amazon.
Although The Specialist scored a cellar-dwelling 5% at Rotten Tomatoes,
it was not a financial failure - not by a long shot. Stallone and Stone were big stars at the time,
and the film somehow did nearly $60 million at the domestic box
office, exceeding $100 million worldwide! Do you think anyone in Peru believes Llosa when he
saunters to the company cafeteria, takes a deep sip of his Inca Cola and
begins to regale his available listeners with his tales of having
once directed a hundred million dollar movie starring Sharon Stone?
They must think he is kidding.
And, in a very real way, he is.
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