Sheena (1984)

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Excellent but underrated film

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Fun camp adventure with Tanya Roberts as the blonde female Tarzan clone Sheena. Roberts is AWFUL but damn nice to look at. The slow-mo shots of her riding her zebra are classic. Ted Wass has fun as the reporter who becomes Sheena's love interest. Oliver Hardy-lookalike Donovan Scott plays Wass' comedic sidekick. French (I think?) actress France Zobda makes for a beautiful villainess but doesn't appear nearly enough. Lots of eye candy and plenty of humor, intended and otherwise, make this an entertaining movie of its type. But it's also overlong and lacking much action for long stretches. The climactic flamingos versus helicopter scene is something you just have to see to believe. Surprisingly, this wasn't made by Dino De Laurentiis or Golan-Globus.

Unless they're part of an ensemble (the X-Men films notably), female comic book superheroes get no respectful cinematically (must be a gender issue). Case in point, "Sheena", the $25 million flop from 1984, that's based on the character created by Jerry Iger (uncle of current Walt Disney Co. head capo Bob Iger) and Will Eisner ("The Spirit"). The survival member of the duo at that time, Eisner had the common sense to not be credited after seeing it. Iger's estate also followed. Who could blame them? Things start well enough when a married geologist team is killed in an African cave in while trying to find a mineral that has healing properties. Their daughter, Janet, is adopted by the ingenious tribe, the Zambouli, as part of a prophecy. The tribe's shaman (Elizabeth Of Toro, the only adept actor here!) rechristens the girl as Sheena and trains her to be the tribe's protector. After learning how to communicating with animals, swing from vines, ride zebraback (don't ask!) and sling arrows through the years (and by the film's main credits), Sheena's a fully grown woman (Tanya Roberts , "The Beastmaster", "That 70s Show"), a mix between Tarzan and any skin-mag dame, and the adventure starts.It's not much of an engaging one, though. Prince Otwani (Trevor Thomas), the NFL athlete (huh?!) brother of the African king whose nation, the fictional Tigora, houses the Zambouli, hopes to financially exploit the mineral for profit by killing his brother and framing the shaman. However, the sports reporter Vic Casey (Ted Wass of "Soap" and "Blossom") following Otwani gets footage of the truth, putting him and his hapless cameraman (Donovan Scott) in danger. However, they meet Sheena, during a rescue of the shaman, and Vic and Sheena have something of a romance while avoiding Otwani and his mercenaries.If you're not convinced by the whole yarn, barely adequately helmed by John Guillermin ("The Towering Inferno", the 1976 King Kong remake), you're not alone because the film doesn't even live to its' own expectations, being an example of how NOT to make a film. Uninspired action sequences; dated plot points; awkward racial stereotypes (Otwani speaking like a African-American street hustler while being African royalty is cringe-inducing) and leaden dialogue infest the half-baked script of David Newman ("Bonnie and Clyde", the first two Superman films), Leslie Stevens (developer of the original "Outer Limits") and Lorenzo Semple Jr. (developer of the 1960s "Batman" series; "Flash Gordon"). It's also no help that the story doesn't know what it wants to be: a campy tribute to the grade-B ,Saturday matinée serials of the 1930s and 1940s (a la "Star Wars") or a live Playboy centerfold photo session (Tanya shows her mammary glands in bathing sessions), mixed with a Sports Illustrated article. I'm still puzzled how it got a PG rating, let alone green-lighted by an A-level film studio! For a B-film, it has no charm! The actors fare no better, especially Roberts, who's like a topless stripper reading Shakespeare (it has happened!) when being profound and Wass (now a sitcom director), who unbelievably turns from hard-boiled cynic to passionate poet (a bad one, at that) when he's with our hero. Richard Hartley's "Chariots Of Fire"-like score is so pretentious, it's ironic that it fits. Pasqualino De Santis' camera work is the only bright spot here, but if you have the guts to buy/rent the film on DVD, you'll lose out (more than already) because there's only a full screen version.When people complain about too many comic book films today, they should be aware that the storytelling medium has been mistreated and misunderstood in the past. "Sheena" is one of those comic book-based films that came out at a time when filmmakers cared nothing for any fanboys' feelings, let alone any smart moviegoer, since they had no Internet to voice their displeasure. Today, the displeasure's in evident, ten times over.

The film for the period was good. It was an adaptation of the women in the movie Tarzan. Sheena had excellent environments and photographs but the base was good. This film had the beautiful actress Tanya Roberts and its thanks. The environments show a 'africa and uncontaminated healthy and the link between this woman and Tarzan animals. The Charlie's angels tried to make this movie for 80 years could be fine. The actress was physically a little 'lean arms were fairly skeletal and the breast was little short, was not a woman but increased for the role that was to run and in one thousand ups went well. The film, I repeat, was a response to male Tarzan although as usual on this website prefers to lay sea everything that was part of anni'80. It 'a tradition!!

This film is painful to watch most of the time. However, it is so bad, that anyone with even a little taste in cinema will start howling with laughter. The director clearly used as few words as possible to direct this film, and the acting is truly awful, making this film unintentionally funny. Ted Wass actually does act in the first scene and in the last, both shot on the same airplane, leading me to suspect that those were filmed before he met his co-star, the truly inept Tanya Roberts. After meeting her, it is apparent that Wass realized just how bad an actress she was, and gave up trying, producing a monotone performance for the rest of the film. Tanya Roberts may have been good looking but her acting range is limited to one expression where she screws her face up in an effort to look like she is concentrating (I thought she might just have been constipated throughout the filming since that is what her one facial expression suggested to me). The best actress in this whole mess, Elizabeth of Toro is killed off only a quarter of the way through the film, which brings the level of acting way down. The production clearly was filmed on a shoestring budget where they couldn't afford to re-shoot anything. Even the casual viewer in the theater is able to spot the wire the model helicopter is being guided by when it crashes (your not supposed to be able to see that), and there is never any kind of a herd of animals on screen in this African jungle movie, just one of any type at a time. If you watch carefully you will see the occasional shadow on the ground which doesn't belong to any actor in the scene(it must be a crew member's). The plot is blindingly obvious with absolutely no surprises or dramatic tension. The script is also very poor, with cheesy dialog running throughout it, and you can predict lines and jokes far in advance of their being said. Actually, the limited script helps as it means you don't have to suffer through Roberts trying to speak. So go to the film and laugh at it, and learn what not to do when producing a movie.