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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Look, unless you are a deep-dive film historian or someone who collects dusty 16mm reels, you can probably skip this one.
It’s a bizarre, highly uncomfortable watch. People who love modern, peaceful nature docs will absolutely hate how they treated animals back then. 🦁
The main guy, Father Wynant D. Hubbard, leads us into Rhodesia. He's trying to sell us "the wild," but it feels more like a local zoo where the cages got left open by accident.
Let’s talk about that lion and hyena fight. It’s clearly staged.
The camera just sits there, slightly shaking, while these two confused beasts try to figure out why they are in the same frame. You can almost feel the crew off-screen poking them with sticks to get some "action."
It doesn't have the artistic, raw montage style of something like Kino-pravda no. 14. Instead, we get basic intertitles that sound like they were copied from a third-grade geography book.
And the tribal customs? Oh boy.
It’s that classic 1930s style of "look at these exotic people doing exotic things for our camera." They look so incredibly tired of Hubbard and his lens.
There is one kid in the background who just stares directly into the camera with this look of pure, unadulterated boredom. Honestly, I related to him the most.
It reminded me a bit of the bizarre cultural clash in The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, except that movie was actually trying to be a comedy.
This safari reel is deadly serious, which makes the fake drama even funnier. The whole thing is only about nine minutes long, but my god, it drags.
The editing is so choppy that a zebra literally teleports across the screen in one cut. I did like the shots of the vultures, though.
They just sit on a dead tree looking incredibly goth. But yeah, unless you want to see how early filmmakers faked reality, there isn't much here.
It's a relic. A dusty, slightly mean-spirited relic of a time we've thankfully moved past.
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