I recall seeing a portion of a movie as a child–and the scene I saw made a gruesome impression upon me. I spent many hours pondering the possibilites of what I saw, and only a re-viewing, as an adult, could tell me if childish imagination supplied these details, or if there actually was a movie made that was indeed this ghastly.
Here’s what my memory tells me I saw:
Deep in the jungle, possibly on a South Seas island, some white people spy on some natives deep in Celebration/Sacrifice Mode. Much dancing about to the throbbing beat of the drum. Crazy firelight plays upon their painted faces. Chanting/singing fills the night air.
At a preappointed time, a victim is selected and tied to two narrow trees, which have been bent all the way to the ground to sort of form an M. Here is the grisly part: to each tree has been tied one foot of the victim. The terrified victim awaits the signal and then WHACK! They cut the trees loose and he is torn in two!!
Then … the white people are discovered peeking in on this ritual. Uh-oh. You know what comes next. One of Our Heroes is tied to the trees! Will he be torn asunder? Right in front of the beautiful girl, inexplicably on the trip?
I would lay awake at night, wondering: would the victim be actually ripped in two, straight down the middle? What about the head? In two? I later realized that probably one of the legs would just get ripped off. More pondering. Would they die right away? Did the body (in its two halves, or one-legged state) just hang in the treetop–or were they flung away into the underbrush? As I say, the whole thing preyed upon my little mind considerably.
So what say thee? Possibly germ of truth blown hideously out of proportion by the innocent imagines of a child, who has no idea of what real cruelty and torture is? Or did someone actually make a movie that contained such hideous scenes?
Do respond if you have a clue–or simply wish to comment upon my depraved mind.
OK, I took the liberty of posting this question on the IMDB board, and one of the experts posited that this movie is “Tarzan Escapes” (1936). Unfortunately, there’s little description on this title to verify it.
I don’t think the skull would let the head get ripped in two. The shock would probably kill them right away if not the massive loss of blood. If the ankles were tied to the trees and the rope held when the trees were let loose, then most likely the two (?) body parts were still tied to the trees. I wonder if they left the parts in the trees for the carrion birds to eat or if someone had to clean up - untie the parts and dispose of them - and how did they dispose of them? Toss them in the cookpot? They were cannibals, right?
“Tarzan Escapes” is probably right. I know it was one of the six Weissmuller ones that featured Maureen O’Hara as Jane, as I distinctly remember her scream of revulsion. “Escapes” was her third outing as Jane.
You wouldn’t want to watch The Naked Prey, then. It’s a 1966 Cornell Wilde film about a group of men on safari who are captured by native tribesmen and tortured in a variety of graphic, imaginative methods. For some reason, my parents took me to this film when I was ten and I barfed up my popcorn in the back seat of the car (it was a drive-in movie).
I think they parodied the “make a wish” scene in a Bob Hope film at some point. IIRC, his shoes came off so he wasn’t ripped in two, but he flew wildly through the air and ended up lodged in the top of a distant pine tree.
Getting back to the grisly butchery questions in the OP, here are two answers:
No, the body wouldn’t neatly unzip up the middle. The pelvis is stronger than the hip joint or the angle at the top of the femur. One leg would be torn “limb from limb.”
Death, while not immediate, wouldn’t take long. Once the femoral artery is severed, you bleed out in 20 minutes or less. The brain would probably run short of blood and lose consciousness a few minutes before that.
