Tarzoon: La Honte de la jungle

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.

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

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.

I'll be honest. This film doesn't live up to Bashki's work. Something went amiss here. The script is surprisingly good, the V'O 's are great and it has many inventive moments too. May'be it tries too hard, by putting so much in. It just doesn't measure up to Bashki's other work. Nonetheless I'll run down the plot. In the adult world, Shame is the Tarzan, but really doesn't have much upstairs. His wife June (his Jane) is very unfulfilled sexually. Shame's quite the impotent one. They have a pet monkey, and use water from an elephant's trunk as their daily mean of showering. Enter the bad bald nasty Queen who desperately needs a head of hair. She has fourteen breasts too, poor dear. After combing through a book of hopeless possibilities, guess who she spots- June. So she sends her johnsons, and their attached nuts, at her order to carry out the abduction of June, and it's Shame to the rescue, where he meets some quite weird characters, on the way. The bouncing balls and penises are great to watch, in an "Are you fu..ing kidding me?" way. No you're not mistaken. We have a separate safari team, one a compulsive swearer, blurting out a chain of non stop f words. He hates flies too. If you're into adult cartoons, or are fans of Bakshi's work, this will still entertain, but some of you might be sold short or on a comedown with this, as it not being in the same vein of other Bashki flicks, but still it's a very inventive, and at times humorous adult pic.

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!