Shennong Savage (2022)

Rating: D+

Dir: Zhihong Chen
Star: Guanying Chen, Yan Rou Lin, Tat-Wah Lok, Chen Bin Zhang
a.k.a. Savage Jungle

This gets off on entirely the wrong foot, introducing us to the major character, Nong Sheng Zhang (Chen), while simultaneously showing us the worst CGI monkey I’ve seen in any film, ever. It’s spectacularly, jaw-droppingly terrible. This kind of thing often gets compared to a bad video game. Except here, you would also have to go back quite some considerable time – likely over a decade – to find a bad video game of comparable quality. And there, it’s likely all the graphics would at least be of similar quality. Here, it’s copy-pasted onto live-action footage with an embarrassing lack of care. I almost quit the movie, not something which happens often.

Things do settle down a bit thereafter, improving simply by getting rid of the crappy simian. Turns out it and Zhang are among the inhabitants of – get this – Evil Valley. In the valley is a tomb, reputed to contain untold riches. The only problem is, nobody who has attempted to loot it, has ever left alive. Duh. Whaddya expect, going into a place called “Evil Valley”? Aiming to end this decades long streak of lethal futility is army guy Li Ben Yan (veteran Hong Kong actor Lok). He takes over a nearby village and starts shooting people until someone agrees to guide them to the treasure. That someone turns out to be Jia Ren Yang (Lin) and her father, albeit reluctantly.

The unwillingness is in part because they lost her brother there years previously, following an attack by a giant, Komodo dragon-like creature. Absolutely no prizes for guessing who Zhang is. Quite how he survived is uncertain. Probably to do with Shitty CGI Monkey, though their relationship initially seemed quite antagonistic. He saves his sister from cliff-related doom, and joins the exploratory party. While Yan isn’t exactly happy, more local knowledge is good, amIrite? Given the poster, I was a bit surprised it’s the tomb raiding aspect (no capital letters, please, for copyright lawsuit avoidance purposes) which takes centre stage, rather than the king kong (yeah, it’s not going to help there, is it?) ones, to the point I’m not going to classify it as a When Chinese Animals Attack film.

However, given the primate quality issues, I’m certainly not going to complain about getting less of it. Does still act as an anchor, dragging the rest of the movie down in its stinking paws. Not that the other elements were great shakes to start with. There’s little original to offer, in terms of plot or characters, and the execution is pretty mid. The unusually sized Komodo is perhaps the facet by which I was most entertained. Now, if that had rescued and brought up the young kid, rather than Shitty CGI Monkey, the film might have been onto something. Instead, it comes off more as a poor excuse, perhaps ripped off from an idea originally rejected by the showrunner for a late-season episode in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.