The film, as it turns out, is known as Jungle Love, a funky Bollywood movie which has become a surprise classic hit mainly in its native land of India, although it otherwise has both a cult following and a small ironic fandom outside of it.
The film was likely conceived by V.N. Menon and Mahendra Dehlvi shortly after the huge domestic success of Adventures of Tarzan at the ever-cutthroat Bollywood box office. Then it got delayed from 1986 up until 1990, mainly due to budget troubles and likely various other kinds of questionable company behaviour.
Nonetheless, the director, producers and cast members had to semi-improvise for a few years until the film was fully completed and released in the summer of 1990. Chances of them still not knowing about their movie being an unofficial adaption of Buruuba and Baruuba combined are much more likely than audiences thought they would.
Is it an unofficial Tarzan film for Ecchi loving adults or is it even a Tarzan movie at all? Nope. Not even close! Despite being billed as ‘a Tarzan movie’, the sources that the film most likely descends are the Baruuba books of Japanese pulp master Yoshimasa Ikeda (1893-1980) and the currently Kadokawa owned Buruuba film, written mostly by mystery master Hideo Oguni (1904-96) but otherwise directed by the reclusive visionary Shigeyoshi Suzuki (1900-76). Unlike the preceding ashcan copy movie, which was filmed in California of all places, it was partially filmed in a Southwestern Ghats park near Chalakkudi in southern Kerala.
The movie’s resident hero is the little-known Rocky as Raja, a guy who is basically a rebadged Baruuba in all but clothes. Unlike his fiercer novel counterpart (at least in spirit, but not in clothes and hairstyle), only his estranged long lost birth mummy was shown, although she happily reunites with him at the end. Its main female star is Kirti Singh as Raja’s girlfriend Rita, a lady who is Reiko Watanabe in all but ethnicity and clothes.
Fellow members of the crazy cast include a little dude in a shoddy chimp costume, a baby and a preteen boy as Raja in his early years, Disco Shanti as a skank, the deliciously villainous Goga Kapoor as a Treasure Hunter, and a bunch of trained animals.
Bollywood’s spin on the Baruuba books and the Buruuba movie, had the aforementioned Raja be the child of a lower noblewoman named Jamuna in the Rani’s palace. Said palace was in a divided kingdom almost always run by snobbish royal chauvinists who fought each other too much. Then again, while trying her best to manage a divided land, an unhappy Rani wrongfully forced her poor maid in waiting to cast off the former’s own dirty son, on the rapids of a muddy river. But the fake chimp instead rescued and delivered him to a disappointed lioness, whose male cubs would be kicked out by their own pride leader days later. Meanwhile, the local Asian elephants and their leader would adopt him as their own newbie. Let’s see the kingdom’s vast amounts of useless treasure in the coming minutes.
Then the story continued. Throughout childhood, the ageing lioness mentor taught Raja how to become a lionhearted man, but he made a friendship with the chimp who saved him years back. The adoptive brother elephant taught him how to be like a knight, while their helpful chimp buddy watched them play fight hard.
As with Baruuba and Buruuba in their respective domains, Raja sometimes drank the milk of his adoptive mummy mentor’s tits as a baby, which implied a rather close bond between mummy mentor and son. But unlike them all, he occasionally does this even as an adult, which is both gross and creepy.
There are two subplots which have a more significant presence on their own in their respective sources. However, they merge into something else entirely, which is that of Rita and her well-meant father. They’re the two people who were forced into joining the forest expedition of an unscrupulous Treasure Hunter related to the two, who doesn’t even care about them. Then she met Raja while in distress, thus he freed her, even though she taught him to speak a small bit of human language later on.
The hijinks continue until she gets into a crazy cat fight with a lady who was likely the Treasure Hunter’s cunning daughter. The cat fight leads to Raja tearing the legs of an unlucky giant muppet spider, who in turn eats such a mean female antagonist, which is before Rita is captured once again, this time by something questionable which does appear more often in the film as well as both the novels and the mangas, a group of nasty fellas (and part time cannibals), themselves played by relatively browner skinned Indians from across the country, who had to look for paycheques when the film was being made.
Unfortunately, they’re still portrayed as stereotypical (though otherwise reasonably spoken) Bollywood Safari Natives, who are actually some of the kingdom’s distraught men in East African inspired clothing (except for the dhotis, which are genuinely South Asian). It’s also chauvinistic when at the same time, Rita wears skimpy (if not too Super Hardcore PR0N) clothing during uncomfortable false boyfriend encounters like this one. Even though the circumstances are still iffy, the men do not intend to actually eat and assault her gratuitously, yet they still chain her up instead.
But as they sing one of the snoopiest villain songs of 1990s Bollywood, they do not only get distracted, but they’re also entertained by her dancing. Later on, despite preparing to rescue Rita once more, Raja himself gets captured by a cuddly looking man-eating plant and has to cut his way out by attacking a stuffed leopard in a hurry.
There’s also a minor subplot focusing on him fostering a baby boy! Even the local forest Rani is smart enough to rethink her boundaries - not only by singly ending the sick custom of abandoning (mainly dirty) baby boys and also baby girls (although the latter ones aren’t really mentioned in the film) but also by mitigating more chauvinism. She also regrets her messy actions, once she reveals to both the goons and the male tribals that she ain’t their toy to play with. Thank goodness, the Treasure Hunter gets struck by something deadly as the consequences of his own greed.
Even funnier and more heartwarming is that unlike in the succeeding Nepali movie, which should’ve had a better sequel, both Raja and Rita get married at the very end. Thereafter they can live in a simple house with their newly adopted baby son. Their adoptive elephant family friends are still living next door, albeit on the nearby ground.
Despite its generally mediocre status, its soundtrack, although a bit behind time, is still pretty good. Another fun fact is that Chandrachur Singh was originally intending to play Raja until he turned it down. Bollywood Jungle Love is also the first non-Japanese jungle film based on the Baruuba books, with the last non-hardcore one being Samir Miya Pawariya and B.S. Balami’s Nepali Jungle Love. It’s also more polished than the Burmese brain-rotting Mockbuster known as Wild and Tame and the tentacle PR0N script that it’s based on.
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