Karzan, Jungle Lord

1972 "Neither Man Nor Beast. Behold A Mighty Warrior Consumed With Passion!"
Karzan, Jungle Lord
3.2| 1h21m| en| More Info
Released: 19 February 1972 Released
Producted By: Prodimex Film
Country: Italy
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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Synopsis

Financed by Lord Carter and led by Captain Fox, an expedition is mounted to find and capture a jungle-man who lives in Africa.

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Steve Nyland (Squonkamatic) One of the tragedies of modern times is the loss of the good old Sunday afternoon movie matinée slots on local television programming that back in the glory days of the 1970s would be filled with schlocky B grade movie material like Hammer horror films, low budget Spaghetti Westerns, Charlie Chan movies, and Tarzan adventures. I still recall a neighbor who would simply not be available on certain Sundays because a couple of Tarzan movies would be playing. The natural appeal of the film series is simple to grasp, and once you get down to it the dumber the stories the more enjoyable the film. Just make sure the elephants stampede at some point, include a fight with an alligator or snake, and make sure that Jane is cute enough to help us forgive the intrusion on the adventure.The Italians & Spaniards made their own "unauthorized" versions of Tarzan of course, slightly altering the name of the character to stuff like "Tarzak", "Zan", "Zambo" and "Karzan", each just slightly different enough to avoid a lawsuit but still evocative of the original Edgar Rice Bourroughs character. Johnny Kissmuller Jr. (is that name for real?) makes a suitably adenoidal vine-swinger, jabbering in mock jungal speak & displaying abdominal muscles in abundance. What is curious is that Karzan does not feature too heavily in this Karzan movie, which concerns itself more with various scenes of stupid Ugly Europeans stumbling around the jungles of darkest Kenya shooting babbling, spear-chucking native types who are apparently too stupid to simply ask the whiteskins "Wassap?" KARZAN is toned-down Jungal Trash, an idiom name that I coined to refer to movies where white skinned caucazoids go to teeming exotic locales & have all sorts of fascinating adventures while the natives carry the luggage. Or, as Spaghetti Western director Miles Deem portrays them, as pop up targets for a somewhat disturbing turkey shoot as they gun down the local populace without ever stopping to reload their pistols. I put the body count in this movie at about 175 dead natives, a plot detail that is appropriately glossed over by concern for one of the European leads who twists his ankle at one point. I mean fun is fun, but if the poor slob can't go nightclub dancing after the safari it doesn't matter how many poor native tribespeople are killed.What is even more mind-boggling is that this roaming My Lai Massacre Safari Special is supposed to be a family film, complete with a cute chimp & a sexy blond jungal babe for Karzak to make kissy-kissy faces with -- The film's erotic high point comes when Karzak and Sheila the Jungal Hottie kidnap the dark haired Euro Babe from the safari party and take her back to their "Gilligan's Island" inspired tree house. The scene where Sheila drinks coconut milk which suggestively splatters onto her bared, suntanned midriff is just slack jawed enough to not qualify as overtly Freudian in nature, though I at least was disappointed when the dark haired Euro babe merely ate the banana that Sheila gives her. A real opportunity for some jungle smut was wasted, but again it's a family film so Sheila has to lick the coconut milk away herself while Tarzak is outside clowning around with a monkey. Talk about needing to re-evaluate one's priorities.For a Miles Deem movie it's actually surprisingly polished, though the way the closing "The End" is shown demonstrates Mr. Deem's remarkable ability to shoot a movie dirt cheap, or rather sand cheap. The conclusion of the story is actually laughable, but then again the whole movie is sort of just half there, existing as little more than a way to absorb 83 minutes of your life as painlessly as possible. I kind of like it but then again I had a hangover and stuff like this is better than grinding up aspirins into Coca Cola. Look for KARZAN on a new DVD release by Retromedia struck from an admirably worn Techniscope print on a double bill with one of those sleazy Italian jungle girl movies. Bring your own coconut milk.4/10: "Relaxingly stupid" is the two word summary I would use.
ccmiller1492 Beautiful color marred by inept camera work and hopeless script...endless irrelevant close-ups and out of frame action sequences follow meaningless long jungle trek sequence in which the members of a "scientific" expedition massacre the local native Africans who seem too stupid to learn that repeated charging with spears doesn't get them anywhere against an inexhaustible supply of guns and ammo. "Karzan" has even less screen time than Miles O'Keefe had in that awful Bo Derek opus. Ettore Manni, veteran of many adventure films here looks bloated and ill. Handsome Browne has nothing to do other than to walk around looking like one of the blond hero puppets out of "Thunderbirds" with his perfectly sculpted haircut, and for some reason his voice sounds as if dubbed by Edmund Purdom. Two of the supporting players look like Ernest Borgnine and Klaus Kinski. There's little else of interest to notice in this film, altogether lamentable.
arildness The voting seems pretty accurate, so I do not feel like mentioning the film per se, just flourish the site with a few scenes from the film. Specially you need mention Karzans head on charge with a croc in water, swimming towards it just to glide on top of his head(of course avoiding the mouth) to fight to death. Also; there's a lot of animal-life clearly taken from other shoots- put into the film to make it more Africa, and also some places to spice up in-itself meaningless scenes, like the one where the jeep get stuck in the sand. The jeep cannot move, so a lion is cut in to make it more exciting - can the jeep escape? The whole scene crashes with the sight of the lion, laying lazily and even yawning.. You could write books about the zooming( and camerawork in general) in this movie. The tag-line occurs when the team is gonna kill a Black Widow(..): "Quick!Aim for a nerve-centre!"A warm recommendation for a good movie for all those who love bad movies.