A test rocket carrying wasps to outer space, to study the effects on them of weightlessness and radiations, crashes out of control back to Earth, into the jungles of Africa. The two astrobiologists in charge of the test mount an expedition to the Darkest Continent to retrieve their experiment, only to find the wasps have grown to giant size which are panicking all forms of life as they quest for food.

Englishman Robinson Crusoe, stranded alone on an island for years, is overjoyed to find a fellow man, a black islander whom he names Friday. But Crusoe cannot overcome the shackles of his own heritage and upbringing and is incapable of seeing Friday as anything other than a savage who needs Crusoe’s brand of cultural and religious enlightenment. Friday attempts to share his own more generous and unashamed culture, but ultimately realizes that Crusoe can never see him as anything but an inferior being. With that awareness, Friday sets out to turn the tables on Crusoe.

A “prequel” of sorts to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” chronicling the two outlaws’ lives in the years before the events portrayed in the Newman/Redford movie.