Sabu (Sabu) lives in a small Indian village. When his young nephew (Paul Dastagir) burns himself on an unusual rock he takes the child, against the local holy man, Shan-Kar’s (Naji) wishes, to see Dr. Paul Morrison (David Brucea) for treatment. The burn is similar to one that Sabu had. Paul thinks that the rock could be radioactive.
He writes a letter to Dr. Angus Caldwell (Ted Stanhope), in England asking him to come to India and investigate. Dr. Caldwell sends his assistant, Dr. Pamela Ames (K. T. Stevens), instead. Pamela’s plane crashes and Paul sends Sabu into the jungle to find the crash site. Sabu finds Pamela, the only survivor, and brings her to Paul.
The burning rock belongs to Shan-Kar who believes that it is a powerful guardian keeping the village safe. Paul tries to get a sample of the rock but Shan-Kar refuses to allow it to be removed from the altar. Shan-Kar is also not thrilled that Paul muscles into his territory by healing sick people. Nearby, listening to their conversation, is Mr. Trosk (George E. Stone). Trosk buys elephants from Shan-Kar and is not above stealing something if he thinks it may be profitable.
Paul thinks there may be more rocks in the jungle. Sabu tells Paul that the village will be pushing down more trees in the area where the rock was found. When Paul, Pamela and Sabu go out to look for more burning rocks they run into Mr. Trosk. Trosk joins them in their search. During their search a flying saucer appears.
“Jungle Hell” was released in 1955 or 1956 and was written and directed by Norman A. Cerf. It is a science fiction jungle movie that was culled together by combining a couple pilot episodes of an unsold television series, featuring Sabu, called “Jungle Boy”. The flying saucer footage was believed to have been added into the film sometime in the 60’s along with some narration that was also added to the film.
There aren’t a lot of jungle movies with flying saucers in them. As far as I’m concerned, this one isn’t either. Since the original episodes had nothing to do with flying saucers the only mention of it is in the narration, which is also inserted to try to bring the two stories together. It doesn’t really work. Between the cut and paste done with the episodes and the inserted additional film clips the entire movie has nothing in the way of story cohesion.
The narration tries to connect the burning rock with the UFO by saying that aliens from outer space brought the rocks to Earth and planted them in various places on the planet. Then the aliens instructed the elephants and the tigers to watch over the rocks promising to return one day to harvest the rocks.
The movie is at least twenty minutes of stock footage. The main attraction of the film is elephants. All elephants, all the time, which is strange since they really have no bearing on the made-up plot and are only mentioned in the narration to account for them being in the movie. The flying saucer footage is less than a minute long and is interspersed throughout the film.
From my understanding there are two versions of the film, the one with narration and UFO at about 77 minutes long and one without at about 82 minutes long. The longer version is also supposed to have more elephants. All in all, we have an unsold television series made into an adventure movie that was then made into a science fiction movie.
Sabu’s son, Paul Dastagir, plays the village child that is injured by the burning rock.