A chartered plane crashes in a remote African desert after colliding with a swarm of locusts. It's not the harsh surroundings or the vicious baboons that the survivors have to worry about, but a fellow crazed passenger. The stellar cast includes Stuart Whitman as a businessman and big-game hunter, Stanley Baker as a chain-smoking and alcoholic mining engineer, Susannah York as a beautiful young divorcee, Nigel Davenport as the plane's captain, Theodore Bikel as a doctor and Harry Andrews as an elderly German gentleman. This was the sixth and final teaming of Baker and his Zulu director Cy Endfield.

Stranded in the African wilds by a plane crash, a disparate group of passengers' worst enemy isn't weather or wild animals but a fellow traveler. A delayed flight causes several South African travelers to charter a small plane from unctuous pilot Sturdevan (Nigel Davenport). Among the group: Dr. Bondrachai (Theodore Bikel), divorcee Grace Munkton (Susannah York), the crooked Brian O'Brien (Stuart Whitman), the elderly German Grimmelman (Harry Andrews), and mining engineer Mike Bain (Stanley Baker). O'Brien bribes Sturdevan to reroute the flight, so when the plane is brought down in the vast Kalahari by an encounter with a cloud of locusts, no rescue can be expected. A struggle for control begins. After Studevan attacks Grace sexually, he is exiled, and Brian takes over. He attempts to banish Bondrachai and Grimmelman, but the latter objects, and Brian kills him. Only Grace and Mike are left to deal with Brian, but when they think they've got the best of him, he manages to stay alive and stalk them to plot his revenge. Vicious local baboons have a surprise for the increasingly deranged Brian, however-they are hunting the hunter. The film re-teams star/co-producer Baker with his ZULU (1964) writer/director Cy Endfield.