In 1994 the home video market was starting to slip from its peak but was still going strong. A Cookbook for Cannibals was gaining something of a cult status and that success got us thinking about the possibility of a movie. Black Rose Productions was founded to create shot-on-video movies for the home video market targeting "erotic horror" as a genre niche. Three such movies were planned. They were:
Of these, only Sacrifice of the White Goddess was ever completed. It was distributed by what is now Alternative Cinema and was sold on VHS tape format. It still remains available (on DVD) on the White Slave Collection anthology from Alternative Cinema (although their contract with us expired in 2011). Sacrifice of the White Goddess is also available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video, which came as a surprise to us because we are not getting any residuals for it.
A studio was rented and a production crew put together for the Tears of Red production, but problems arose and the production fell apart. Having the studio already rented, rather than wasting that we built a quick jungle village set next to the Tears of Red dungeon and hastily shot one of the shorts for the Cookbook for Cannibals movie. That short became Jungle Drums.
Ultimately the Cookbook for Cannibals movie project never fully came together, either. One other segment was shot (Gary Miller's The Beauty Pageant) but the third segment and wrap around story were never produced. By the latter 90s the home video market was being replaced by online streaming and it was becoming difficult to produce video of any quality for the kind of budgets we were dealing with. Distribution deals for VHS video were getting hard to come by and so the project was eventually shelved.
In 2005 the new Canntoon.com website was looking for relevant content. It offered a streaming platform with revenue potential. Jungle Drums was converted to DV digital from the Super-VHS master tapes and edited as a streaming digital video short. The video was edited to look like a 1970s "grindhouse" movie, complete with a "Copyright 1973" (it was actually shot in 1994). It was made available as premium content on canntoon.com and later on its successor pulptoon.com. The video is occasionally re-rendered for changing video formats and players to maintain compatibility.
The full Jungle Drums video runs approximately 25 minutes as an MP4 video. If the video was rated it would have an "R" rating for topless nudity and risque adult humor, but no "hardcore" sex. Until recently, Jungle Drums has been available for download only on Clips4Sale. It has been placed "under review", which means that it will likely no longer be available on that platform.
Should the video be removed permanently from clips4sale, we will look for another streaming platform for the video. If a new host for the video is found, a link to it will be posted on this page. Until then, here is the trailer made for the video when it premiered on canntoon.com.