The Zoolander Tarzan, Lex Barker, is given a new Jane in Vanessa Brown – no real improvement on Brenda Joyce, she’s like Tarzan’s slightly underage girlfriend. (How come Tarzan got to strut around in a loincloth while Jane only showed a bit of midriff?). The plot of this one involves girls who are abducted by members of (yet another predominantly white) lost civilisation looking for a cure.
This is like the eighth film in a row which features a more interesting female character than Jane (even though the last six had Jane in them) – in this case a French nurse, Lola (Denise Darcel) who pants over Tarzan and winds up abducted with Jane. She’s a great character – wild, sexually uninhibited, spunky; Robert Alda is her love interest and you know he’ll have her hands full with her down the track.
Barker still looks like he’s on his way to a tanning session at a Paddington gym, but he’s a bit more comfortable in the role now – and he does give Tarzan a bit more intelligence than Weismuller did (Barker’s Tarzan is more of a grown up). Tarzan is treated as a sex object here for the first time in a while, with Lola panting over Tarzan at an infirmary – she and Jane even have a cat fight (Jane flips her – alright!).
The soldiers from the lost civilisation are dressed like Robin Hood’s merry men, complete with bows and arrows. Cheetah gets drunk, there is quite a suspenseful sequence where Tarzan is leading an expedition and it all goes silent (this lasts around five minutes. There’s also a decent finale where they’re going to throw a nice priest to the lions.
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