Sick Product of a Sick System

How sad is this?

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

SAFARI is a stock Hollywood adventure film set and made in Africa. The backdrop of the story is an interesting one that takes in the Mau Mau Uprising and includes a surprisingly vicious and adult opening sequence which works in the film's favour and is in actuality the best part of the movie: vivid, shocking, and a real hammer blow to the stomach.After this point the film goes down a gear and provides fitfully exciting viewing, although not without the problems associated with the big bucks productions of this era. One of these is Victor Mature as the heroic lead; his performance is entirely old-fashioned here and he looks like he's come straight from the 1940s. Janet Leigh is better as the love interest and disrobes for a couple of bathing scenes which would have been racy for the time.SAFARI also boasts the underrated Bermudan character actor Earl Cameron (SAPPHIRE) as the chief antagonist and very good he is too. The action bits are handled well and inevitably the scenery is a star in itself. A shame, then, that the overall experience is marred by footage of African creatures being shot which looks surprisingly realistic and makes me wonder if it was indeed done for real.

Always enjoyed Victor Mature movies and he was great as usual.I will never understand why with all the expense of making a movie they very rarely get even close to the firearm reality of what is necessary.None of the big bore rifles even sounded close to being real. As in later movies like Anaconda they show bolt action rifles being fired repeatedly without the shooter cycling the weapon, reloading with the bolt action being used etc. There is poor sound and absolutely no recoil even being feigned. It is as if they are shooting Daisy air rifles.When Victor Mature asks for his 900 grain bullets for his big bore express rifle, that was good as they used Holland AND Holland .500 and .600 nitro Express rifles back then, with side by side rifled barrels.Yet when he shot it, there again was no recoil. All that expensive footage shot yet they show a river scene with a sound stage movie screen behind them, why use that at all? The dead lion dummy, drugged starving circus lion whatever they used looked to be hundreds of pounds lighter than a 500lb plus Atari.Still very enjoyable movie.

***SPOILERS*** While out in the African savanna gunning down rouge bull elephants great white hunter Ken Dufield, Victor Mature, gets the terrible news that his house or homestead outside of Nairobi and been attacked and burned down by a gang of Mau Mau's with his 12 year old son Kenny Jr, Chris Warbey,and the house help brutally murdered by the marauding terrorist gang. It just happened that Dufield was hired by big time British explorer and blue blood Sir Vincent Brampton, Roland Culver, to track this giant 550 pound man eating lion Atari who's been dining on the local native population! With the news that the Dufield household's trusting and faithful houseboy the 35 year old Jeroge,Earl Cameron, was an undercover Mau Mau general and was responsible for the carnage at the Dufield house and the death of little Kenny Big Ken Dufield is more interested in hunting Jeroge down and killing him then the man eating lion Atari that Sir Vincent hired him to kill!Walking a tightrope in trying to track down both Arati and Jeorge deep in Mau Mau country things get a bit more complicated for Dufield in that Sir Vincent brought his fiancée former showgirl Linda Latham, Janet Leigh, along for the ride! Being obligated to track down and shoot Atari Dufield at first sets his sights on the man eater before on General Jeroge. It was Sir Vincent who pulled strings to get Dufield's hunting license back which was by then lifted by the colonial government. That's when it was deemed, in starting up with the local Mau Mau's in trying to kill General Jeorge, that Dufield was a danger to the community. It's in fact Sir Vincent, in jumping or shooting off his gun, who makes thing far far worse by wounding the big cat and making him far more dangerous then he already was. As for Linda she had plans of her own in seeing the sights and almost getting herself killed in the process. That's when rowing in the dangerous African waters on a rubber dingy she got caught in a riptide that almost had her killed either by drowning or being eating by a bunch of hungry crocodiles! That's until Dufield came to her rescue shooting down, as well as getting his pants wet, the swarming crocks as they were about to close in on her.***SPOILERS*** It's after the man eater Atari is finally put away with a bullet, courtesy of Ken Dufield, between the eyes that it's reported that a major Mau Mau attack lead by General Jeroge has taken place when 200 interned Mau Mau's had broken out of a British detention camp outside of Nairobi. That finally gave Dufield the chance he's been itching for to get a shot at General Jeroge for murdering his son Kenny and the help at the Dufield house. Cowboy and Indian like ending with General or Chief Jeroge and his men, in the part of the Indians, getting by far the worst of it. With the calvary, in the person of the colonial troops, coming to the rescue in just the nick of time to save Dufield and whatever was still left, which included Linda, of his by now almost non existent safari.

I saw this as a kid and remember the initial mau mau attack as very frightening. Mature was adequate in the part. He was never one of my favorite actors, but the more I see of his old movies today, the more I begin to appreciate his films. Would love to see "Safari" again, especially now that I know Terence Young directed it.