Tarzan the Ape Man

Directed by John Derek, Tarzan the Ape Man follows Bo Derek’s Jane Parker as she eventually encounters and falls in love with Miles O’Keeffe’s title figure – much to the frustration of her overbearing father (Richard Harris’ James). Filmmaker Derek, armed with Tom Rowe and Gary Goddard’s screenplay, delivers a persistently sluggish and uninvolving disaster that strikes all the wrong notes right from the get-go, as the movie boasts (or suffers from) an often interminable first half that details James and Jane’s tedious expedition across Africa – with the arms-length atmosphere perpetuated by Derek’s mostly incompetent approach to the padded-out material. (There is, for example, an absolutely endless slow-motion sequence wherein Tarzan saves Jane from a deadly snake.) And while the picture does contain a very small handful of agreeable attributes, including copious Derek nudity and an agreeably larger-than-life Harris performance (eg he hilariously pronounces the “n” in “goddamned”), Tarzan the Ape Man builds towards a thoroughly tiresome and hopelessly anticlimactic final stretch that ensures the whole thing concludes on just about as lackluster a note as one could imagine – which ultimately cements its place as a laughably bad trainwreck that fares even worse than its bleak reputation might’ve indicated.

* out of ****