I've Got It! - My Guilty Movie Pleasure

Everybody's got a guilty pleasure movie. Something that is frowned up by the masses but you've grown to cherish and love. It might be something where you disagree with others critisisms...or that you acknowledge them, but love it all the same. I like several such movies, but my favorite guilty pleasure is the 1986 Cannon production of King Soloman's Mines starring Richard Chamberlain and a young Sharon Stone.

So why's it disliked? Well it's produced by the Cannon Group, the unholy alliance of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who produced cheap tat like the American Ninja series before moving onto bigger budget shlock like Stallone's Over The Top and Lundgren's Masters of the Universe. Like all their movies, it's an exploitation flick...a cheap rip off...this time stealing liberally from Indiana Jones.

Big game hunter Allan Quartermain, (a long in the tooth but charismatic) Richard Chamberlain guides scientists daughter (an impossibly hot) Sharon Stone through Africa on a quest to find the fabled King Soloman's Mines...evading vengeful Turks, greedy Germans and hungry naitives.

There's several elements that make this fantastic. The script bounces from one set-piece to another with inventive action, hilarious quips and one-liners (the repeated dynamite gag "I've got it" never fails to amuse) and a play-ful tongue-in-cheek tone throughout. It knows it's daft and doesn't pretend otherwise. The cast are uniformly suburb; in addition to the natural banter of Chamberlain and Stone, John Rees Davies chews up the scenery as Dogati and Herbert Lom excels as arrogant German commander, Colonel Bogner. The Zimbabwe shot movie feels mostly epic (especially for the limited budget) especially the early scenes in Tongola, the African town, the likes of which I've not seen in a movie since.

Special mention to Jerry Goldsmith's stunning high-adventure score which is kept pretty high in the mix. Goldsmith's stuff was always better suited to larger than life, slightly old fashioned movies...and the Oscar winning composer produces one of his very very best...even if the movie itself isn't an A-List production.

But you can't take the exploitation out of the exploitation movie. Despite the period setting, the African natives are portrayed with as primitive, second hand citizens...even extending to sidekick Umbopo (at least Quartermain aqknowledges this, trying to free the slaves). The sound mix, presumably recorded live on set, often feels tinny and hollow. The money seems to have run out when it comes to the rear projection effects (the dogfight looks cheap...but at least its funny). Plus the sets of The Mines themselves look like they've been sculpted out of paper mache by a four year old. There's an ill-advised attempt to create Shelob the giant spider here but it built out of cardboard and puppeteered by retarded blind otters. Finally there are gigantic logic problems with the plot where the whole thing will fall apart if you think about it for too long.

But really, I'm just nitpicking. The movie has such a powerful sense of adventure and such entertaining and funny sequences, you can't help but warm to it. It's like a live-action comic strip...one that poor stephen Sommer never came close to capturing in The Mummy movies. Suck on that Sommers!