AllMovie

This low-budget jungle adventure tale stars Deborah Raffin as a dedicated anthropologist who hires boozy, woman-hating helicopter pilot Peter Fonda to fly her into the dark inner depths of the Philippine jungle in search of one of her colleagues, who disappeared while searching for the legendary lost tribe of winged dwarf creatures. Re-titled Jungle Heat for video release and packaged like an Indiana Jones-style adventure, this plays like a low-rent, horror-tinged update of The African Queen, focusing more on the constant verbal sparring between the cultured Raffin and the coarse, hard-drinking Fonda than on the weird, gargoyle-like pygmies. The script -- based on the novel by Geoffrey Household -- sacrifices too many potential thrills for plodding exposition and half-baked humor.