Search - Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold on DVD

A throwback to the bad old days

A. P. Stafford | Sydney, Australia | 03/04/2006

(2 out of 5 stars)

"Once upon a time somebody released a movie called Raiders of the Lost Ark, which did very well at the box office. There was a scramble to cash in on its success, and so, some Hollywood types decided to re-make Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines with Richard Chamberlain and the relatively unknow Sharon Stone. It wasn't a bad movie, but it was no masterpiece either. As the making of the movie progressed, Miss Stone's garments kept shrinking in the wash. The makers, realising that this might save the box office receipts decided to accelerate the trend, and, halfway through one scene her Bombay bloomers miraculously transformed themselves in to hot pants.

Subseqently, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released and was a hit, to they released a sequel to King Solomon's Mines called Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold, with the same cast as before, to cash in again.

Now you know that any movie with Lost City of Gold in the title is going to be a stinker, but will be saved by the continuing shrinking of Miss Stone's garments and the presence of bikini clad Amazons. Unfortunately, two things went wrong. One, Miss Stone's contract had a fully clothed clause in it and she remains overclad. Two, they sent the bloke who does the flower arrangements out to hire the bikini clad Amazons and he returned with a lot of his similarly inclined male friends clad in white pajamas instead. Result: insufficient crumpet!

They borrowed certain elements from Temple of Doom. Sharon Stone screams more than Kate Capshaw. There is a roller coaster ride through underground caverns, this time in a canoe instead of a mine cart. There are hapless native slaves in a mine and a lava pit for the sacrifices.

Otherwise the movie is a throwback to an earlier era of B movie making. In those old jungle movies, the blacks were in it to:
a. Shout menacingly and throw spears,
b. Provide the corpses, and.
c. Provide the comedy relief, unless there was a monkey called Cheeta.
In this movie there are:
a. blacks who shout and throw spears,
b. five Ashari warriors who play the part of the five green bottles sitting on a wall (Somebody actually says: "Oh, look! We've lost another Ashari."), and,
c. there is James Earle Jones providing the unintended comedy relief, in what is easily the worst performance of his otherwise distinguished career. Tarzan isn't in this one so somebody has to substitute for the monkey and James got picked.

There is also a beautiful princess. She is a goodie, so she is blonde. She has an evil sister, who is, naturally, brunette. So is the evil, if somewhat unkempt, high priest. In old westerns you could tell who the goodies and the badies were by the colour of their hats, but this isn't a western, so we have to rely on hair colour. There are no injuns either, so the blacks attack the fort. Oops, I mean lost city.

Much of the middle of the movie ended on the cutting room floor to keep it short, so the climactic bit doesn't make much sense, but don't worry, you can watch the trailer and see the missing bits. In fact, if you don't watch the trailer you won't see Dicky Chamberlain rescue the slaves or understand why the fort (sorry, city) is attacked.

In summary, this is a rather old fashioned jungle B movie. It's not terribly good, but if you are supposed to be mowing the lawn, and it is raining, this will get you out of the housework and give you a laugh or two. Some of the laughs will even be intentional."

Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of, er, White

Trevor Willsmer | London, England | 05/17/2008

(1 out of 5 stars)

""Half of Africa's been explored on rumor, hope, legend..." "And blood" The same could be said of the film industry. The 'recupero,' as the Italian film industry dubbed it, was one of the most forlornly hopeful forms of film-making: offsetting part of the cost of the film you wanted to make by filming another on the cheap back-to-back with as many of the same cast, crew and locations as possible in the hope that at least one of them would be a hit even though just about the only recorded case of that ever happening was when Il Magnifico Straniero, shot back-to-back with Bullets Don't Argue to 'use up waste materials,' became a surprise hit after changing its title to Fistful of Dollars. Much loved by exploitation merchants, it was no surprise that Cannon films would adopt the practice, especially after their two back-to-back Missing in Action pictures proved surprisingly profitable. Having ripped off Rambo, Indiana Jones seemed the next obvious target, but their back-to-back sequel to 1985's King Solomon's Mines, one of their least unsuccessful films (well, it lost less than most of them), proved a disaster on every conceivable level. While H. Rider Haggard wrote enough unfilmed Allan Quatermain novels to keep a franchise running for a decade, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold is one of those films that's so bad it's just bad, making you glad they called it a day after this one.

On paper it has everything you need for a somewhat average movie except enthusiasm and belief, as Haggard's Great White Hunter Allan Quatermain (Richard Chamberlain) postpones his wedding to a hyperactive and very loud Sharon Stone to find a lost city of gold in search of his missing brother (Freudians could probably read something into the fact that Quatermain's brother is played by Chamberlain's longtime companion Martin Rabbett), battling hostile tribes, booby traps and the elements en route and braving the most pathetic backprojection seen this side of the original Dr Who in a comically cranked-up log ride through an underground river. All of which happens in the least interesting way possible - this is the kind of film where they don't even try to hide the wires on the stunt performers and where the extras just look bored in the final battle. Even the score is just barely edited musical selections from an uncredited Jerry Goldsmith's score for the previous film (mostly just the crescendos) with the odd synth drumbeat linking them the sole audible contribution from credited composer Michael Linn.

There's not much gold on display in the lost city either, but then Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of White doesn't really have the same ring to it. Not that it's a city: it's obviously a Zimbabwean tourist hunting lodge that bought a job lot of white dressing gowns. You know it's a pretty screwed up place because one of its twin queens is played by Elvira and the evil high priest is Henry Silva in one of Diana Ross's old Afro wigs that's seen much better days (as indeed has he). At times it plays like a Who Can Be the Most Annoying competition, with Razzie-nominated Sharon Stone forfeiting her early lead to James Earl Jones' too-bored-to-bother warrior only for Mork and Mindy regular Robert Donner channelling Spike Milligan and Carry On Up the Khyber's Cardew Robinson at the top of his voice as an 'Indian' holy man to steal the prize. It's a surprise to see that it was shot in post-independence Zimbabwe since it has many of the hallmarks of the kind of film that used to shoot in apartheid South Africa - blacks are expendable children, Indians comic buffoons with silly voices, whites are the master race and everyone would stay happily in their place if it weren't for foreigners stirring up trouble.

Where the first film had the director of The Guns of Navarone and the original Cape Fear, J. Lee Thompson, to keep things professional enough, this has to settle for the director of The Black Hole, Gary Nelson (with 'additional scenes directed by Newt Arnold'), who is singularly unable to motivate his cast and crew. Chamberlain is barely making an effort here and clearly gives up near the end, though it's no surprise in a film that looks like only the rehearsals were shot, and only one take at that. The closest it comes to charm is when the real cold that Stone is obviously suffering in one scene is clearly caught by Chamberlain in the next. The biggest curiosity about the film is that most of the action in the trailer doesn't appear in the film at all despite looking rather less inept that what made the final cut, leaving the feeling of something that's been patched together in post over the weekend on an Ed Wood budget. If you ever wondered why Haggard's other Allan Quatermain novels have never been filmed, this utterly dire and nigh-unwatchable venture provides ample explanation."