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Customer Reviews of Tarzan the Ape Man

Jungle fever for Bo!
One need only look at the cover of this DVD to see what the story is really about. It's not Tarzan, but Jane. Bo Derek is the #1 selling point of the film, and she is basically the only reason anyone should bother buying this DVD. Bo Derek is certainly the sexiest Jane ever. However, she is not the best Jane ever. That distinction belongs to Andie McDowell in [[ASIN:B0001NBLYK Greystoke - The Legend of Tarzan]]. As such, the whole story is centered around her and her attempts to reconcile with her estranged father (Richard Harris). <
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>There is possibly the least about Tarzan in this film of any Tarzan movie ever made. He is simply a wild man in the jungle and nothing more. He barely does anything other than wrestle a snake (for what seemed like 1/2 hour) and wrestle a macho native. There is no characterization whatsoever; nobody ever asks where he came from or what he's doing in Africa. It seems that nobody even cares! The Tarzan depicted in this film is a far cry from the Tarzan of the novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the novels Tarzan is highly intelligent and cunning, while in this flick he is basically an ignorant brute & nothing more. I will say that one thing they DID get right was his physique. A buffed-up Miles O'Keefe fills that aspect nicely. <
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>If you are looking for a Tarzan movie that remotely resembles the vision of Edgar Rice Burroughs, this is not the avenue to go. The late Richard Harris was a great actor, but even he is not enough to drag this film into the realm of respectability. As is the case with most John Derek films, the movie plods along at a snail-like pace. In the end (and this is an unfortunate thing to say about a Tarzan movie), the single biggest reason this flick is worth a look is to see Bo Derek au-natural in Africa. Basically, the whole movie seems to be a side-trip to see Bo topless. That's not an altogether bad thing, but.....

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Make Camp...
When Bo Derek emerged from Blake Edwards's hit 10 as a cornrow-sporting sex symbol, she and her Svengali-like mentor John Derek--who'd been, at one time, a wooden movie pinup himself--decided that together they'd "create" Bo's subsequent starring vehicles. This collaboration resulted in a trio of Bad Movies To Love, including the 1981 Tarzan, the Ape Man. "Produced" by Bo and "directed and photographed" by John, Tarzan reduced Edgar Rice Burrough's far-from-classic work to the level of a magazine spread on a Playboy bunny in the, er, bush. <
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>Richard Harris, an explorer in deepest, darkest Africa, is expecting the next boat to deliver a cannon, but instead he receives bombshell Bo, playing his long-estranged daughter. Her thespian skills had not improved one whit since her first Bad Movie with Harris, Orca, but blank-eyed Bo clearly hadn't a clue. "You first-class b--tard," she says to Harris, mistakenly believing that the dreamy, "I've-just-had-the-most-fabulous-orgasm" look on her face could possibly be interpreted as anger. Bo's utter ineptitude is made all the funnier by Harris's response, which is to ham it up to the skies--and beyond. When Bo leaves his welcoming party, Harris says to his mongrels, "She didn't find me a pretty sight. Do you think I--overdressed?" We fully expect one of the dogs to reply, "No, you--overacted." <
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>Bo takes command of this soft-core extravaganza by doing what she's best at: stripping off her Banana Republic-style wardrobe to swim--well, perhaps "bob" is the more accurate term--in that ocean surf rarely seen in films set in the middle of the Dark Continent. Bo in the buff brings around Miles O'Keeffe, a very buffed Tarzan, and just when it seems that this comely pair might turn the movie into a hard-core porn flick--which would've been a big improvement--Harris literally runs into the frame, screaming at his safari aide (Bad Movie vet John Phillip Law), "Make camp, make camp, make camp!" It's hard to imagine how the flick could be any campier. One night, hearing Tarzan's patented yell, Harris bellows back, "Shut up, you boring son of a ...!"--the very thing that the Dereks should have told Harris. Bo instead calls Harris a "b--tard" again, prompting this reply: "I am. I wallow in me. I indulge myself 100 percent. Take my advice, dear, do the same thing." As if the notoriously self-indulgent Dereks weren't already way, way past the 100 percent mark! <
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>After O'Keeffe saves Bo from a riotous slow-mo encounter with a rubber snake, his unconscious body gets carried away on the tusks of an obliging elephant as Bo, panting with lust, follows along. Grimacing while picking at her teeth (apparently to suggest that she's thinking), Bo eyes O'Keeffe's physique and says, "I've never touched a man before..."--a howler that's topped when these two go swimming. "I feel like I'm reading this in a book," Bo exults, as if she could read. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry or just turn to the next page!" It all ends, as we'd hoped it would, with local savages forcing a nude Bo down on all fours. "They're washing me," she cries, in one of our most favorite Bad Movie lines ever, "just like a horse!" O'Keeffe rescues her--but it was too late to save her career. <
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Me Trazan, You, lousey movie
I had never seen any of John Derek's movies before just recently and wasn't familiar with his work. After seeing this, I understood what his movies were all about : putting his beautiful woman on a pedastal, make her an object of desire, and sort of indirectly taunt the audience saying "This woman is with ME". He did that with Ursula Andress, Linda Evans, and finally Bo Derek. Substancewise, this movie leaves much to be desired (and I'm not talking about THAT desire). <
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>Bo plays Jane, who comes to Africa to visit her father on an anthropology trip. Here she encounters Tarzan in the brush, they have a few meetings here and there which are building to the inevitable. She is kidnapped by natives and rescued by Tarzan, then leaves civilization to be with the Ape Man in the jungle. <
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>Hmmm ... I guess you just had to be there. Personally I can't imagine someone going off into the jungle to live among the creatures no matter how hot the guy is (whose communication skills are just a bunch of grunts). Then again, this is one of those fantasy situations. For the men it's just about Bo. For the women, it's about a handsome stranger who takes you off to live in his palace (or jungle) like a somewhat fractured fairy tale. Fantasies, however, are just that. Fantasies. They don't last long. It's eye candy. You're better off looking at still photos on the Internet.