‘Jungle Warriors’: the 1984 movie so manic it made Dennis Hopper beg to be killed
In April 1970, Michelle Phillips filed for divorce from Dennis Hopper after just eight days of marriage. In retrospect, that might seem like it marks a bit of a downfall by any measure.
In reality, eight days represents pretty good going for Hopper in his heyday. In fact, the debauchery that led to his premature divorce was just getting started. As he later reconciled, “Seven of those days were pretty good. The eighth day was the bad one.” The ratio would sadly tailspin in the intervening years.
14 years later, he was still enjoying the wilder side of life. He managed to sneak in another divorce in the interim, eking this one out with the arts therapist, Daria Halprin, for four years before severing the knot and reverting to his bachelor lifestyle of ludicrous abandon, if it can ever be said that it had ceased.
In the years that followed, the Easy Rider director threw himself towards opportunities that promised misadventure rather than the usual lavishes of Hollywood. Fame, awards, and being part of something timeless held little appeal when there was premium grade drugs to be taken in the jungle.
Notably among the mad array of projects that litter the revered actor’s filmography during this chaotic period is the 1984 movie Jungle Warriors, which comes with the asterisk that he was replaced mid-shoot.
The whys and wherefores behind him signing up for the B-movie project remain mysterious, the main factor simply being that the shoot was in Mexico and he fancied a holiday, if, indeed, you can call what followed a holiday. Although, it certainly didn’t have much to do with filmmaking either. A plot involving a “group of models” might’ve also swayed him.
Hopper had already proved wayward during the early days of the shoot, but at one point, matters came to a head when he couldn’t be contacted at all. Producers failed to find him. As it turns out, he had consumed an excessive amount of LSD and tequila, if such a thing as a moderate amount of that combination can be said to exist.
In a frenzied state, the two time Academy Award nominee decided to strip off his clothes and go for a wander in whichever direction his poor old pecker pointed.
The small town of Cuernavaca, where filming was taking place, was on the brink of the Lagunas de Zempoala National Park – a fitting place for a movie called Jungle Warriors to unravel. But Hopper was no warrior; he was naked, alone, tripping out of his mind, and soon to be very afraid.
His stroll was full of peril. In a hallucinatory haze, a menagerie of deadly creatures, drug cartels and the howls of Aztec beasts all haunted his psyche. He fretted as he ventured ever deeper into the depths of Lagunas de Zempoala where Mountain Lions and Mexican Rattlesnakes are known to prowl. Meanwhile, the film crew awaited his return.
Lost, alone and fully nude, it would be the local police who eventually found him. They were not expecting his response. In a mad bid to get them to put him out of his psychedelic misery, he tried to fight the officers in the hope that they would open fire on his frail, naked frame and kill him. So, perturbed was he by his time in the jungle, being slain by Mexican police was his hopeful preference to the bewildering life he was suddenly living.
Despite Hopper begging them to kill him, the authorities managed to subdue the actor pretty easily, and soon, he was simply hallucinating in the confines of a South American law enforcement facility.
Alas, his brush with death was far from over even after the producers of the film he never actually featured in stepped in to send him back to the States. They chartered him a plane, but this didn’t ensure his safe return to normality. Far from it, in fact.
“I was making a movie, but I never made it to the set,“ he once told Stuart Jeffries. “They found me running around the jungle naked,” the man who once admitted that he was sexually attracted to his own mother recalled. When he was located, he was in a state of heightened panic and cinematic disillusionment.
This mindset continued at “Mexico City airport,“ he said, “I thought I was in the middle of a movie and walked out on the wing. I was out of my mind. It was around then I decided it was time to get into rehab. My liver, my body, my brain were all shot.“ He concluded this remark with maniacal laughter, a Hopper trademark regardless of the preceding comment.
Thankfully, he did find relative sobriety in his later years and managed to put the harrows of Mexico behind him. As for Jungle Warriors, the tale of a troupe of models scouting out photo locations in South America before seeing their plane shot down and captured by a drug baron is now subsumed by Hopper’s own internalised version of the plot: an actor fleeing his own plane to take a cartel’s worth of LSD and attempting to get himself shot down in a bewildering daze of horror.
