CinemaSerf

Herman Brix/Bruce Bennett takes his turn in the loin cloth in this clumsily condensed (from a twelve parter) feature that like so many modern day soaps, takes an age to tell story that really only needs forty-five minutes. "Tarzan" isn't half bad in this, neither is the slightly more sultry "Ula" (Ula Vale) but the rest of it is pitiful stiff - except perhaps for the efforts of "Jackie" the MGM staff lion, to whom many of the remaining cast might well have been fed. I would say the script too, but that'd be too chewy - even for a full grown King of the Jungle. To be fair to it, it is slightly more faithful to the original Edgar Rice Burroughs characterisations - Tarzan is far less monosyllabic, for a start; and the chimp called "Nkima" rather than "Cheetah" as in later iterations. We move from Africa to Guatemala and get caught up in the search for an idol that involves lots of jungle action and the usual plot lines become evident (over and over again). I haven't seen the episodic version - that might do the whole thing more justice, but the amalgamated version looks like it has been badly hacked by someone less than adept with a razor blade - either with sound or vision and with even less regard for continuity or the narrative.