AKA Man from Deep River - Another Umberto Lenzi movie and one of his best.
Rassimov plays Bradley a photographer on assigment in Thailand where after a bar fight goes wrong flees up river with his guide.
He awakes one morning to find the guide murdered and is taken captive by a local tribe. He is used as slave labour and after a while tries to escape but is captured and kills one of the tribes warriors.
Realising his worth the tribal elder invites him to become a warrior helped by the fact that his daughter (Lai) has taken a fancy to him.
Soon that are married and she is with child - Bradley saves a small boy thus undermining the local witch doctor and when Lai is taken ill and goes blind its implied its his doing..
Later in his career Lenzi would make some of the more infamous cannibal movies of the genre and this is seen as the movie that launched them which is a little unfair.
There is only one small cannibal scene and that's when a rival tribe attack and its main influence is a Man Called Horse with a parallel story line where the civilised man sees nobility in the more simple way of life.
it was banned under the video nasty scare in the uk - mainly for the animal sacrifice scenes but its a much better film than a lot of these.
Rassamov and Lai are very good in the roles and it avoids most of the normal condesension about savage natives that tends to be the normal view - 4/5