Trader Hornee

When TRADER HORNEE was released, I was just a little kid and never heard of it back then. Flash forward to today, I had to check this infamous nudie comedy because I basically rent anything from Something Weird. It's odd to think that 30 years or so ago a lot of people were probably offended by these kinds of movies like TRADER HORNEE, which, by standards, looks positively cute and quaint compared to all the sleazy stuff seen on cable or satellite networks. Heck, it looks positively quaint next to Russ Meyer's stuff.

The cast is game and the whole production is barely adequate and not spectacular (as opposed to what the extremely long trailer on the DVD says. A cast of thousand?!?!). TRADER HORNEE is for nostalgia buffs who have seen it before and want to see it again; for anyone who likes a lot of derriere shots of average looking women (or black men); and John Alderman in black bikini briefs.

Now, what exactly is this supposed to be? Let's pose the same question in multiple-choice format, shall we? Is "Trader Hornee": A – a comedy? B – a sex film? C – a jungle adventure? D – all of the above. Surely the creators will try and convince you it's a mixture of everything, but the painful truth is that "Trader Hornee" eventually ends up being nothing at all. I appreciated the spirit and joyfulness of everyone involved in the cast, but after barely 20 minutes or so, the film has little else to offer but sheer boredom and forced chuckles. Private eye Hornee (his name is an obvious running joke) and his playful assistant are hired by a bank director and sent to Africa to look for the heiress of a wealthy couple of adventurers that went missing 16 years ago. For you see, during their quest to capture a rare white gorilla, the girls' parents were killed by a tribe of savages and she was never heard of again. Hornee, his assistant, some greedy relatives, a gossipy journalist and a scientist still on the lookout for the white gorilla form quite the unusual expedition crew and discover that the girl is still alive, but not exactly willing to return to the civilized world. The plot, and clearly also the title, is based on a 30's movie called "Trader Horn" that I haven't seen but heard very good things about. The concept of a 'White tribal queen' also got used in several cheap and sleazy (Italian) cannibal flicks, but – at least not to my knowledge – never in a sexy comedy. Well, the genre classification is debatable, since the film isn't very funny or sexy. All the ladies – especially the jungle queen – look delicious and show a fair amount of flesh, but these moments are too brief and practically always second to lame jokes. For early 70's standards and, moreover, Something Weird traditions, "Trader Hornee" isn't nearly naughty or rancid enough and simply pales in comparison with "The Adult Version of Jekyll and Hyde", "Space Thing" and "Sinderella". The S&M loving cousins are cute and the scenes with the white gorilla actually stalking the team provoke some genuine laughs, but overall the film is a waste of time.

This crappy sex comedy was apparently based on a classic movie with a similar title. That fact doesn't make any difference, however, because as a porn film, a spoof, a jungle adventure or anything else; Trader Hornee is a crappy film that doesn't work on any level. The plot is just an excuse for the main characters to venture off into the jungle and have sex and focuses on the hunt for a so-called 'White Gorilla'. The film is laden with a load of humour and none of it works very well at all and succeeds only in being irritating. There is a fair bit of sex and nudity, but it's not all that good in context and the fact that there is a hell of a lot of better porn films than this one makes watching it even more of a chore. To the film's credit, the production values actually aren't that bad and the set design is decent enough - although this isn't all that good considering that most people won't be watching this film to admire the sets! This film might appeal to fans of cheesy soft-core porn, but such people could definitely find better examples than this one. I don't recommend anyone wastes time on this film.

I saw this one many years ago at a drive-in; part of a double or triple feature. I probably shouldn't go into details where the original sexual content is concerned, but it would still be X by today's standards! Part of the comedy/sex angle involved the villainous redhead's scoping out potential sex partners while her male cohort was plotting crimes. I don't think any Academy Awards were being considered for this cast or film, but Trader Hornee had some watchable goofiness and explicit sex scenes.

I purchased a DVD of this not too long ago, and regrettably had to send it back for a refund. All of the sex had been edited out, and I think other content was removed as well. Having seen the REAL one, I couldn't accept the "updated" version. Trader Hornee, edited and sex-deleted, is like The Exorcist without the turning head and the green puke!!!

My Dad's favorite movie of all time is the 1931 Harry Carey African adventure "Trader Horn," and I think he would be both appalled and amused to learn that a 1970 skin-flick comedy had later been made based on it. Well, leave it to those maniacs at Something Weird to retrieve this one from obscurity, and give it a nice DVD treatment, too. In "Trader Hornee," Indiana detective Hamilton Hornee (pronounced "Horn") ventures to wildest Africa (an Africa that looks strangely like rural California) with his hotty redheaded secretary to locate an heiress who's been missing for 15 years. Accompanying them are the heiress' S&M-loving cousins, a doofus naturalist looking for the legendary white ape Nabuko, reporter Tender Lee, and a drunken safari guide. Anyway, this film mixes some very soft-core sex scenes with incredibly lame humor of the vaudeville-circuit calibre. Thus, when captured by the jive-talking Meshpokas tribe (I can almost hear all the Yiddish speakers out there collectively groaning about now!), Hornee tells them, "Wait, I'm a friend of Sammy Davis, Jr." The vast majority of the jokes fall equally flat (how did they ever manage to skip a line about "bushwhacking"?), although there are unintentional laffs in abundance. All four of the film's gals look pretty nice, however, and the picture, though filmed on the cheap, looks surprisingly decent, too. Despite the insipid humor, I was somehow never bored. As far as spoofs go, I suppose one could do a lot worse, and you will certainly be more than amused when the Meshpokas go into their choreographed native song and dance, I promise you! I found this dumb movie fun enough, although I'm still not in any hurry to tell my Dad of its existence...