Tarzan the Ape Man (1981)
(In French, On TV, June 2019) You all know the Tarzan legend, but there isn’t quite another take like the one in Tarzan the Ape-Man. Weirdness starts from the studio logo, with a Tarzan yell coming out of MGM’s lion. Then it’s off to the nude girl figurehead of Svengali productions. Then off to a jokey narration as then-superstar Bo Derek is introduced as Jane well before Tarzan. Oh yes, amazingly enough, this is a soft-core erotic take on Tarzan, still chaste enough to be classified as a mainstream film fit to play on French-Canadian TV, but with enough nudity to place it in the middle of the early-morning schedule. Produced and directed by John Derek (the husband of), it’s a very self-aware film, deliberately putting Jane’s story first ahead of Tarzan—it takes 45 minutes until Tarzan strolls into the frame, and Derek (the wife of) happens to be in a wet white robe at the time. But the craziness doesn’t stop there. Definitely overwrought at times, Tarzan the Ape Man features one of the most melodramatic “Nooo, god why did you do that!” (Backlit with superimposed rainbow, no less) in movie history. But wait: it gets better. If you accept the snake being an all-purpose phallic symbol, then the scenes in which Derek gets attacked by a snake and rescued by Tarzan (in slow motion, for several minutes) gets funnier and funnier. Alas, the unintentional laughs aren’t as constant as you’d think. Tarzan the Ape Man remains a very, very long film especially when the camera lingers on, convinced via John that Bo Derek is God’s gift to primitive mankind. (I could describe the body-painting sequence, but you wouldn’t believe me.) And there’s a paradox here that makes any attempted reinterpretation of Tarzan the Ape Man as a feminist reimagining a bit moot, considering the copious amount of male gaze (indeed, outright husband gaze) in the film. At least the nice scenery is there, ensuring further similarities with The Blue Lagoon. Predictably enough, the portrayal of native population is straight out of the colonial era. I can’t say I liked Tarzan the Ape Man all that much, but there’s definitely some material here for connoisseurs of unique bad movies.