Tarzoon, la honte de la jungle

Classic cult movie that everyone remembers as a teenager.

My memory of the film still makes me laugh and have not seen it for 30 years or so! I wonder what I would think if I watched it again now aged 45.

It's playground humour will not appeal to everybody, but anyone one who hasn't seen it should give it a go.

It will entertain anybody who finds VIZ funny or people who giggle when they fart in a lift and then leave at the next floor, or people who get into a lift just to fart and then leave on the same floor!

The animation is very good for it's time and it is what it is.

Great.

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.

This is a movie for people that love gratuitous cartoon sexuality, large anthropomorphic genitals and general grotesquerie.

It's fun and imaginative with a lot to offer.

I especially love a sight gag of Tintin forcing the bible on the natives.

Okay, first things first: NO!! This has NOTHING to do with Ralph Bakshi. Jeez, another reviewer here (thankfully with zero upvotes) went on a rant about how this was lame for Bakshi, etc, etc. Wow. And, look! Here we are at IMDb where the cast & crew is listed clearly. It's a FRENCH-made film!

Whew.

That said... it's written by Mr. Mike! It's awkward, weird, dry as hell, funny, unfunny and sometimes actually entertaining.

I've never seen the original French version, so I can't compare, but methinks something was lost in the translation. I would guess that Mr. Mike and Anne Beatts just scrapped the original script and made up their own (kinda like J-Men Forever or What's Up Tiger Lily?). And, sure, Brian Doyle Murray, Bill Murray, John Belushi, etc are all there to help... only you have to be more stoned than they were to enjoy it.

But, really, it has it's moments!

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.