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Showing posts with label Tarzan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tarzan. Show all posts

September 14, 2014

Movie Review: Tarzan (2013; Constantin Film/Lionsgate)

...yep, these days, the legendary Lord of the Apes...well, he ain't gettin' no love, film-wise. No siree, bob...in this day and age of super-powered, gadget-toting iron men, bat men and spider men, and/or other-worldly super men, ol' muscle-bound, grunting, vine-swinging Tarzan, for the most part, seems to be getting the ol' shaft-o-roonie. Eh, understandable, one might suppose, considering today's superhero-worshipping audience might well take one look at a celluloid-rendered version of Edgar Rice Burrough's classic literary character, shrug their shoulders, and think, '...eh, no powers?? Just muscle, animal 'magnetism' and the typical sense of right, wrong & justice...besides all that, who and what the heck is he, and what can he actually do, compared to...say, the likes of Wolverine, or The Hulk??" In fact, getting less respect, these days, than even the often heckled Aquaman...and heck, we don't even need to go there, right??...

...and to think, at one time, Tarzan was much more respectfully revered, as a savage 'hero amongst heroes'...at least, cinematically (...all due credit to athletically-vigorous Johnny Weismuller, or even via early TV broadcast (...oh, that muscle-bound Ron Ely). So what gives, as far as contemporary depiction of the once-iconic character, who pretty much hasn't seen proper representation, since...uh, can you say 'Christopher Highlander Lambert', in the heavily dramatic 1984 compeller, "Greystoke, the Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes"?? Who knows?? But in the advent of Disney, having let their rights to the character expire, and recently, those rights having been deftly picked up by a German computer animation production company...well, let's just say that our intrepid, vine-swinging Lord of the Apes, isn't exactly faring particularly well, of late, and has definitely seen better days...

March 5, 2013

Movie Review: Climb It, Tarzan! (2011, Independent Entertainment)

Directed by Jared Masters
Starring Jennicka Andersson, Jamie Devitt and Zrinka Dozic
Run Time: 75 minutes
Unrated

The time is the sixties, its the dawn of the sexploitation era and aspiring model Ginger (Jamie Devitt) learns the only available photo assignments are for naughty men’s magazines, and that she must risk eviction or succumb to the sadistic perversions of dominating lesbian photographer Paula (Jennicka Andersson). As naive Ginger discovers first-hand that there is no chance of becoming a wholesome pin-up queen, her secretive sister Janet (Jessica Hichborn) takes a job as a go-go dancer, baring her flesh by night and living out of a Venice Beach sailboat by night.

Billed as a tribute to sexploitation cinema, Climb It, Tarzan! consists of an all-female cast of over fifty young budding starlets, most of which are more then willing to “drop the top” for the camera of the creepy but hot Scandinavian photographer Paula. In all honesty this movie started out quite nicely, with a nude photo-shoot followed by the hapless model getting chloroformed and molested by the photographer. Five minutes in I’m thinking to myself, “Gentlemen, we have a winner!” Unfortunately it was all pretty much a free-fall into the lamest, most yawn-inducing recesses of bad-cinema imaginable from that point forward.