Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle! (1975)

Absolutely the worst movie.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Four years after the original French release of this adult animated feature, this movie arrived in the US with some cuts and new dialogue written by a couple of "Saturday Night Live" staffers: Michael O'Donoghue and Anne Beatts. Many of the cast from that show were involved with the voices: John Belushi, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Christopher Guest though the last one had joined the show several years later. I was initially highly amused by many of the blatant imagery concerning certain body parts and some of the dialogue about lack of sexual power concerning Shame and June, but the meandering nature of the narrative and not-so-clever wordplay among the characters just threatened to bring things down to a bore for me. Oh, and I also wasn't crazy about the pointless cameos by Tintin and his dog Snowy. The animation was interesting throughout, however, and I did like the clever disco music that was played in some sequences. So on that note, Shame of the Jungle is at the least worth a look.

I was first intrigued by this via a still in "The Movie", an early 1980s British film periodical, where it was mentioned in an entry dedicated to animation; I also recall my father renting it on VHS – under its U.K. title of JUNGLE BURGER – in the mid-1980s but, of course, I was too young to be allowed to watch this or even understand it. The edition I acquired had the benefit of the English-dubbed soundtrack (with the hero, spoofing the popular character of Tarzan, voiced by Johnny Weissmuller Jr.[!] – son of the screen's most famous "Ape Man" – and the participation of many a "Saturday Night Live" exponent) but I opted to watch the original French version (accompanied by Italian rather than English subtitles).Anyway, while the film is moderately amusing, it's in no way a classic (falling far below the standard of even contemporary artist/film-maker Ralph Bakshi); incidentally, it exhibits a similar predilection for explicit violence and sexuality (indeed it's swamped by the latter, particularly during the second half, with the hero depicted as impotent and where both characters and landscape are shaped like male and female genitalia)! The villainess, then, is a bald lady with fourteen breasts (perhaps a nod to the then-latest Bond adventure THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN [1974] – speaking of cinematic references, there's an obscure one involving the maligned but not-too-bad religious epic THE SILVER CHALICE [1954], which I watched for the first time only last month): she's flanked by a mad scientist with two heads who, typically for such evil "Siamese twins" caricatures, are constantly quarrelling among themselves.

Not quite awful but very far from good, this odd little movie wears out its welcome a lot sooner than you might imagine. It's like one of those sub-standard VIZ clones that cluttered up newsagent's shelves from the late eighties onward come to life, with a screenplay apparently written by an unreconstructed nightclub comedian who aims for the lowest common denominator and hits his target every time. It might be funny to see marching genitalia, a monkey poking a woman's naked breasts or the Tarzan character getting his penis stretched to impossible lengths the first couple of times, but that's really all the film has going for it in the humour department. A shame, because the animation is actually pretty good, and whoever came up with the rich soundtrack score deserved to see his work put to better use. The film achieved a minor cult following in the early days of home video in England due to its explicit (for the time) subject matter and the novelty value of seeing cute characters behaving badly.

Shame comes home and find his mate, June, abducted by...well..peckers! His ape explains in graphic details how June was aroused and abducted by the penises and demonstrated how it...well...spanked the monkey when the peckers aroused June. Lotsa slapstick, politically incorrect humor, not just about sex, but also about colonization ("Africa - the continent where life is spun by a thinner thread than other places"). The animation is fluent and rich, the soundtrack is rock'nrolling and this is really a bellylaugh-a-minute movie. Some people are likely to find the movie quite provocative but this is better natured than Fritz the Cat, which on occation turned quite violent without the redeeming humor, but there is certainly a kinship. The humor occationally gets quite elephantine, quite literary! Highly entertaining. 7/10