My review was written in April 1986 after watching the film at a Times Square screening room.
Filmed over two years ago in Kenya, "In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro" is an old-fashioned adventure thriller in the borderline horror genre of a last-stand-at-the-house against predators, previously essayed in such films as "Kingdom of the Spiders", "Savage Harvest" and "Roar". Box office outlook is weak.
A famine has caused the 90,000 baboons on a Kenya wildlife reservation to begin banding together an preying on humans (film claims on-screen to be base on a true story, but the 1984 date given is impossible). Wildlife ranger John (Jack to his friends) Ringtree -played by Timothy Bottoms, wants to evacuate the area of about 200 people but the government and manager of the local mine Chris Tucker (John Rhys-Davies) view him as an alarmist and oppose his efforts. As usual in corny horror films like this one, the cast (especially female) is given to wandering alone in the bush long after word of animal attacks has been announced, making them easy prey.
Eventually the danger comes close to home and all survivors huddle together in a hotel run by Michele Carey. The last stand against the marauding animals is successful and a convenient rainstorm spells the end of the drought and the problem.
Hokey film benefits from atmospheric location photography, but suffers from sometimes inaudible dialog recorded in direct sound. Rhys-Davies uses a prop-cigar and a new accent in a fun job as a villain, but by the final reels he has become a true-blue good guy, with only the baboons as hissable targets. Bottoms is merely okay as the bland hero, Irene Miracle is extremely glamorous as his "please come home with met to America" nagging wife (in a role reserved decades ago in these films for Elsa Martinelli) and it's fun to see 1960s starlet Michele Carey again, as the friendly neighborhood hotelier. Leonard Trolley is so hammy as an old British colonial type recalling the good old days that one wishes he had been fed to the baboons early on.
Director Raju Patel substitutes gore effects for suspense in an episodic presentation that fails to knit individual scenes together. Unconvincing matte shots are used to show hundreds of baboons storming down from the hills, while more manageable stagings of a dozen or o animals are used to enact the attacks on humans. Situation inevitably conjures up memories of Cy Endfield's minor 1965 classic "Sands of the Kalahari", but instead of that film's genuinely chilling climax of the baboons descending in long shot on the surviving protagonist (which left the horror to one's imagination), we now get severed limbs, half-eaten faces and torsos and other ineffective gimmicks.
