PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes 1983

Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes is a 1983 film with a much too long title. It's directed by Hugh Hudson, the screenplay is by PH Vazak (Robert Towne) and Michael Austin. They've adapted the first Tarzan novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs but changed it a good bit. The basic core of Tarzan's father and mother going off to Africa, only to be shipwrecked and left stranded on a strange African shore. The Clayton's survive for a while, Tarzan is born, then their killed by the apes and Tarzan gets adopted by Kala, his ape mother. Tarzan lives his life with the apes before he meets the man who brings him to civilization.

Christopher Lambert plays Tarzan and Ian Holm plays Capitaine Philippe D'Arnot. D'Arnot brings Tarzan back to the Clayton family home in Scotland. Ralph Richardson plays Tarzan's grandfather in his last film appearance. Andie MacDowell plays Miss Jane Porter.

I remember liking the movie when I saw it in the theater. It's not exactly like the book but it manages to capture the jungle life that created the Ape Man better than most movies. I enjoyed seeing it again and will watch it again some day. I listened to the commentary by director Hugh Hudson and Associate Producer Gareth Thomas. It was OK and somewhat informative.

I was quite pleased to get a copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs 100 Year Art Chronology. I've been flipping through the volumes and looking at the art. The 15 pound set collects more than 5000 pieces of artwork that were used to illustrate the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs. There's a nice black slipcase and the 4 hardcovers have a page count of about 1200. Much of the artwork is printed about a quarter of a page. The illustrations still look fine and there are many full pagers.

Volume 1 covers the pulp magazines. It's the thinnest volume, just barely 200 pages. The other volumes are all over 300 pages.

Volume 2 covers the books and there have been a lot of those in 100 plus years.

They reprint my favorite series of covers. Richard Powers illustrated 22 covers for Ballantine Books in the 60s.

Volume 3 is the first of two volumes that cover the comic books. It's all cover reprints and the Dell and Goldkey runs are rather nice. Plenty of photo covers and nice paintings.

Volume 4 finishes off the US comic publishers. I can't say I liked the Dynamite comics versions much. Luckily it spends a nice bit of time with the British comics. There's, sadly, little material on the foreign language comics. A 5 page cover gallery just isn't enough. Mind you, that might mean another 2 volumes of comic covers.

The older illustrations have been cleaned up and images look as good as they did on the newsstands of the day. Micheal Tierney pens about 140,000 words to hep you to the background of the art. The books are nicely produced and there's a nice price. $250. It's published by Chenault and Gray and sold through their Troll House Games online store and other dealers. I got mine through DreamHaven.

Friday Night Movies 689

Tarzan The Ape Man is a 1959 film with Denny Miller as Tarzan. I was pretty sure I hadn't see it before, but truth be told, it turns out that I had seen parts of it before. MGM has re-make rights to their 1932 film Tarzan Of The Apes so they decided to re-make the film. Sy Weintraub had the rights to the other Tarzan films and he was making Tarzan's Greatest Adventure at the same time.

For an MGM film it seems pretty low budget, making it, rather sadly, a poor  addition to the Tarzan film library. Roger Hill beats some words into a screenplay but he doesn't have much of a story. Joseph M Newman directed the scenes that were new to the film. The film makers borrow heavily from the 1932 Tarzan Of The Apes, the 1934 Tarzan And His Mate, and the 1937 King Soloman's Mines. All of those were B&W films and this new one is color. You'll notice that right off. There's a good bit of miss matched color stock footage of animals wedged in there too.

Besides Denny Miller, there's Joanna Barnes, Cesare Danova and Robert Douglas in the cast. Joanna is Jane, Robert her father and Cesare their guide. They encounter a Tarzan that doesn't speak much English. Tarzan fights some critters, Denny Miller fights a stuffed leopard, and Johnny Weissmuller fights a crocodile. That was the footage from Tarzan And His Mate. There's a good bit of tramping through the jungle and some noticeable rock climbing. It's all to the  score by jazz thingy Shorty Rogers. I can't say I disliked the movie but it sure wasn't something anyone could be proud of. Since I bought it, I'll keep it, making my Tarzan collection that much more complete.

The Evil Of Dracula is the 3rd of 1970s vampire films from Toho. It's came out in 1974 and once again the style copies the Hammer horror film. A teacher arrives at a school to find the Principal's wife has just died. She's down in the basement for a week. It's a local custom. The teacher has an odd dream about the dead wife. Soon enough it's a battle to the death with the vampires. There's plenty of tooth flashing and dripping blood. It's similar to the other two films in quality. I'm going to keep an eye on the price for the three film set. It'll get cheaper someday or I won't bother with it.

Tarzan 2013

I got Netflix to send me this 2013 German animated version of Tarzan. Good thing, it's pretty poor. It's all the fault of Reinhard Klooss, he's the producer and director, and he co-wrote the script with Jessica Postigo and Yoni Brenner.

They've changed Tarzan's origin story, it's set in modern day, and the Greystoke's are in Africa when their helicopter crashes. The son is the only survivor and he's raised by Kala, an ape. The African jungle teams with the regular sorts of jungle  critters but we've also got some dinosaur like birds and a giant worm like thing that can swallow people whole. There's some violence but hardly anyone dies, on screen at least. The baddies might have had a bad end but we'll never know, the movie cuts away as their helicopter disappears into the mist. Did it crash? It's near the end of the movie and at that point why would I even care.

I didn't care much for the character design and Tarzan's yell is embarrassingly sad. Some of the backgrounds look better than others, but at times it's like watching action figures on a plastic playset. If a giant hand came in from stage left to move the characters around, I wouldn't be surprised. After a while I had the thing playing at 2 times speed just to get to the end. The music sucked too. I briefly looked at the extras but it was mostly featurettes on the motion capture  for the animation. I'm bored with that sort of thing. Not much reason to add this to my Tarzan collection. I'll stick with the live action films of the past. They don't deliver the Tarzan of the books but I have grown fond of those films.

Friday Night Movies 607

The Legend Of Tarzan is a 2016 movie with Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L Jackson, Margot Robbie, Djimon Hounsou, Jim Broadbent, and Christoph Waltz. It's got a script by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer. David Yates is the director. You might remember that David directed the last 4 Harry Potter films and Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them. 

There are some major changes to the Tarzan story in The Legend Of Tarzan. John Clayton III, Lord Greystoke, played by Alexander Skarsgård, is living happily in his family home in England. He's asked by the Prime Minister, played by Jim Broadbent, to accept King Leopold's invitation to the Congo to see what's going on there. King Leopold has been mistreating the people there, in the real world as many as 10 million died while under his greedy thumb, but Tarzan doesn't want to go back to Africa. That's a big change from the novels where Tarzan really wants to return to the jungle. American envoy George Washington Williams, played by Samuel Jackson, talks him into accepting the invite. Jane, played by Margot Robbie, decides to travel with her husband against his wishes.

King Leopold's evil creep Leon Rom, played by Christoph Waltz, has made a deal with Chief Mbonga, played by Djimon Hounsou, to trade Tarzan for some much needed diamonds. Mbonga wants Tarzan so he can gets some revenge for the Ape Man killing his son. The son had killed Kala, Tarzan's Mangani mother, and in a fit of rage Tarzan killed the son. Tarzan left Africa soon after and in the ensuing 8 years Mbonga has grown vengeful. King Leopold is short of funds for his army of mercenaries and he wants the diamonds to continue his plan to enslave the whole of the Congo. Once there Rom puts his plan into action. It has a lot of hiccups and Jane gets kidnapped but not Tarzan. Now there's a chase across Africa while Tarzan follows behind.

We watched a Blu-ray and that sure looks good. There's plenty of jungle business, lots of critters and fights. It's filled with CGI and most of it looks great. That's one of the things the $180,000,000 budget got spent on. It's a bit slow at times but there's usually something interesting to look at. Not much of it was actually filmed in Africa. It's a lot like the Warner Brothers Tarzan movies of the past with the backlot filling in for Africa. Still I enjoyed it enough to want to add it to my collection and watch it again.

I wouldn't rush to see the 1994 film Dark Angel: The Ascent again. It's not awful or anything, it's just such a hodgepodge of a story that's hard for me to make up my mind about. It's a Full Moon release written by Matthew Bright and directed by Linda Hassani. Matthew wrote a few movies in a career that went from 1980 to 2004. His first film was Forbidden Zone, a film that doesn't blow your mind so much as punch it and drench it with wee. It's not a very good film that attracts people with it's sheer awfulness. He did pen the much superior Freeway and it's not quite as good sequel. Between those two he wrote Modern Vampires. It's a film worth seeing. He directed both the Freeway movies and a couple of other films I haven't seen. Linda directed a short, some TV before this direct to video offering. She hasn't done much of anything since.

Dark Angel: The Ascent is about a demon from Hell, called Veronica, who escapes and winds up on Earth. Angela Featherstone plays Veronica and she does a good enough job. The other cast members are a mixed lot and some are less good. Still, they've got to work to get better, so good on them. Veronica meets up with a doctor after getting run down by a car. She tricks him into letting her stay with him. On a trip through the city she sees some villains robbing and assaulting a woman. She puts a stop to that, kills the men, and her Hellhound eats their flesh. The poor victim is sent to hospital all gibbering from seeing Veronica rip the spine from one guy. Then she kills a couple of crooked cops. Detectives investigate but they aren't up to putting down a demon. One detective winds up all screwed up after she shows him a vision of Hell.

There's a romance with the doctor and some fights. It's rather talky and pokey at times. There's some OK gore, some nudity and some dumb demon scenes in Hell with Veronica's parents. Eventually there's a happy ending for our demon and her doc. There's better demon movies but it scores a 6.2 on the IMDb so you know it has it's fans. I'm not such a fan but it was more watchable than a lot of things I watch. You could find many better demon movies if you look about. I don't feel the need to get a copy of this one.