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TARZAN THE APE MAN
Rating: 
USA. 1981.
Director/Photography – John Derek, Screenplay – Gary Goddard & Tom Rowe, Based on the Novel Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Producer – Bo Derek, Music – Perry Botkin, Art Direction – Alan Roderick-Jones. Production Company – United Artists.
Cast:
Bo Derek (Jane Parker), Miles O’Keeffe (Tarzan), Richard Harris (Parker)
Plot: Jane Parker goes to Africa to locate her father, who has gone missing while searching for a fabled elephant’s graveyard. Finding him, she joins his expedition. She hears of a legendary ghost that haunts the jungle and whose roar can be heard. As they head inland, the muscular jungle man Tarzan, the source of the roar, saves her life. The two soon fall in love.
In the 1990s, there was Pamela Anderson; in the early 1980s, the equivalent was Bo Derek. Bo was one of the genuine no-talent phenomena of the era. Bo came to fame in 10 (1979), a Blake Edwards comedy where Dudley Moore plays a man going through a midlife crisis who becomes sexually fixated on her. Bo Derek’s supporting role in the film catapulted her to instant worldwide sex symbol. It was also at this very instant of Bo’s success that her career began to plummet. This was managed by her husband John Derek, a former actor who was thirty years her senior. John used the springboard of Bo’s newfound celebrity to launch a career as a director. He put Bo through four films beginning with Tarzan the Ape Man here. Each of these was increasingly worse than the last – other of Bo Derek’s films included the excruciating Bolero (1984) and Ghosts Can’t Do It (1990). All of these films founded themselves on Bo Derek undressed – nothing else. The films are abysmal, made all the more so by Bo’s phenomenal lack of acting talent and being premised on nothing other than her willingness to shed her clothes at the drop of a hat. The expression on her face throughout the films is entirely vacant.
To say that Tarzan the Ape Man, the Dereks’ take on Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan of the Apes (1912), is their best film is no particular recommendation. The Dereks managed to obtain a modest $6.5 million budget for the film. This allowed them to go to Sri Lanka to shoot, which does afford some lavish location photography. Alas, the film they produced is a ludicrously empty bore. You feel like you have stumbled into watching a home movie of the two on vacation. For one, is misnomer to call it a Tarzan film – it should have been called Jane. Tarzan does not appear until nearly halfway through and has no dialogue when he does. Even the film’s poster consists of Bo swinging on a vine through the jungle with Tarzan nowhere in sight. He is portrayed as the most musclebound and primitive of all screen Tarzans – indeed, the film never even deigns to offer any explanation of what he is doing there in the jungle. The entire focus of the film is on Jane in the form of Bo Derek and on providing cursory scenes that give her almost any opportunity to shed her clothes.
Appreciation of Bo Derek’s phenomenal figure aside, Tarzan the Ape Man quickly lapses into tedium. There is almost nothing that happens in the film – no drama, no story, nothing. There is barely even any action – Tarzan never gets to engage in any vine-swinging. There is one laughable scene where Miles O’Keeffe pretends to wrestle a rubber snake in slow motion and a vaguely developed menace towards the end where Bo Derek is captured by a pygmy tribe who strip her naked and paint her body but everything else is centred around the location scenery and Bo’s naked body. Of equally awful fascination is the normally respectable Richard Harris who lets all stops go in a performance of truly over-the-top hamming.
The Edgar Rice Burroughs estate were upset at the softcore treatment of the material and tried to sue to stop the film’s release. “It was quite incidental that out clothes were off in some scenes,” Bo Derek claimed in defence. “Our film was done in the finest of taste – taste the Pope would applaud,” claimed John. His Holiness’s comments are not on record but to some extent the Dereks have a point – the MGM/Johnny Weissmuller portrayal of Tarzan and Jane as little more than jungle dwelling suburbanites bordered on the hysterically unreal; the Dereks, however indecently, merely added a degree of frank realistic reappreciation to the relationship.
The other film versions of the Tarzan story are:– Tarzan of the Apes (1918), the silent Elmo Lincoln version; Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), the classic version with Johnny Weissmuller; Tarzan the Ape Man (1959) starring Denny Miller; Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), a lavish version starring Christopher Lambert; and the Disney animated version Tarzan (1999).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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