No rockets. Just Tarzan.

 Adventures of Tarzan (1985) is a product of the golden age of Bollywood plagiarism, a time when you could pad out your Tarzan movie with songs lifted from The Sound of Music. At its best, it's the kind of movie I that I can use the sentence "Tarzan incapacitates the snipers with thrown guitars" when summarizing.  At it's worst . . . well, we'll get to that.

 

Tarzan (Hemant Birje) is a legendary figure, believed to live somewhere deep in the jungles of India.  When circus owner Krishnakant Verma (Narendranath Malhotra) sees a news report about a recent Tarzan sighting, he hires big game hunter D. K. (Dalip Tahil) to capture the wild man so he can force him to perform in the circus, because that's much easier than hiring an acrobat and having them dress up as Tarzan.

 D. K. teams up with shady archeologist Shetty (Om Shivpuri), who is leading an expedition to discover the lost civilization of Shakhabhumi.  Soon they're joined by Shetty's estranged daughter Ruby (Kimi Katkar), who traveled thousands of miles to tell her father she hates him, but reconciles with him almost immediately and is soon hanging around the expedition and occasionally wandering into the jungle.

 At night the expedition members can hear Tarzan's cry echoing through the jungle, and occasionally stragglers are carried off - not by Tarzan, by a problematic tribe of angry natives and their enormous Chief (Gorilla, and that is the actor's screen name; I'm not editorializing) but everyone assumes that Tarzan is responsible for everything bad.

After sneaking off to bathe in a river, Ruby is attacked by a rubber crocodile, and rescued by Tarzan.  She drives him away with her pistol.  On another day,  she's bitten by a venomous snake, and Tarzan saves her again.  At this point it's getting dark and she doesn't know how to get back to camp, so she embraces her narrative roll and falls in love with Tarzan instead.  

In the morning Tarzan takes her back to the camp, and D. K. and the others immediately shoot at him.  From here things proceed as you might expect, alternating between jungle peril and the developing romance.  Ruby sings a song as she tries to teach Tarzan the English alphabet for some reason, and in another scene she's abducted by natives.

One day, while Ruby is in the jungle making friends with all of the stock footage animals, the natives attack the expedition and wipe out nearly everybody, except for D. K. and his personal henchmen.  Tarzan fights the natives, but D. K. takes the opportunity to tranquilize Tarzan and capture him and Ruby.

 D. K. delivers Tarzan to the circus, and he plans to force Ruby to marry him, but it's soon clear that the only way they can get Tarzan to cooperate with the show is by directly threatening Ruby, so that's what they do.  D. K. and Verma add her to the show; she'll sing while Tarzan performs feats of acrobatics, then after the first night D. K. will forcibly marry her.  They plan to have snipers with rifles placed about the tent to keep Tarzan in line, but they don't have a backup plan in case Tarzan incapacitates the snipers with thrown guitars, and they really didn't count on a small army of jungle animals attacking the city to rescue their friend.

This in sot a good movie, but it's generally on the pulpy side of ridiculous. It's also structured like a King Kong movie rather than a Tarzan movie, with Tarzan treated as a figure of legend, the ruthless hunter, the kind woman who touches the ape-man's heart, and the greedy showman who refuses to cancel his exhibition despite being clearly warned about his impending doom.

 

I would probably like it a lot more if it wasn't so damned sleazy. It's not so much Ruby's skimpy costumes; that's in genre for both tarzan and Kong..  It's the fact that Ruby is repeatedly threatened with sexual assault, by D. K., by the natives, and even by two random sailors he meets while traveling to join her father in a scene which  doesn't connect the plot and seems to be there to establish that Ruby has a gun and isn't afraid to use it, though after shooting the sailors she goes on her way, and only uses the gun to scare Tarzan during their first meeting.  The movie opens with a flashback to a woman (presumably Tarzan's mother, but they never really spell out his origins)  dragged off screaming by the natives after watching her husband being murdered.  Sexual assault as a plot device was distressingly common in the Bollywood of the eighties, but this movie really leans into it.

In other words, tone is a serious problem here.  The movie wants to be light hearted pulpy and romantic fun,  but it's a bit too enthusiastic about putting its heroine in peril, and while Bollywood has never been good at portraying Adivasi communities, this movie is particularly bad about that as well.  There are some fun bits, but if you want Tarzan, you might be better off just reading the books.

 

 

That just raises further questions!

From the moment I first saw the amazing movie poster, I have dreamed of watching Rocket Tarzan (1963). For the longest time, that was easier said than done, but the current copyright holders have finally put a nearly complete version on Youtube, and my dream has been fulfilled. Well, kind of - the print is grainy and occasionally skips, the sound drops out completely from time to time, and most seriously, there are no subtitles. Ive managed to watch the occasional movie without benefit of subtitles in the past, but Rocket Tarzan is particularly tricky since there is so much apparently going on and I still have yet to find a single plot summary online.

Here's what I've been able to figure out. Tarzan lives deep in the jungles of India or possibly Africa; either way, sometimes he fights lions and sometimes he fights tigers. he's not alone in the jungle, though. There's a nearby kingdom, which may be a surviving Roman colony, or may be an ordinary isolated kingdom with a fondness for cosplay. There is also a brilliant professor, his beautiful daughter, and his laurel-and-hardyish lab assistants/comic relief sidekicks. The professor is trying to build a rocket to travel to the moon. The people of the mystery kingdom are helping him, but a guy with a mustache wants the rocket for himself! Fortunately, Tarzan is there to help, and also fortunately the comic sidekicks are surprisingly competent; one of them gains superhuman strength and combat skills when he drinks from the bottle he always carries with him, but I'm not completely sure if it's some sort of potion or he's just a mean drunk.

After many shenanigans and kidnappings and narrow escapes the main characters all climb aboard the rocket (with Mustache Guy stowing away) and fly to the moon, where they discover ancient ruins, cheap sets, giant cardboard stars, and a big-nosed evil alien who sends a robot (or "Robert," as he keeps saying) to attack our heroes. (They are actually menaced by two apparently unrelated robots. The one from the poster is by far the more convincing of the pair.) The Robert is defeated, the big nosed alien is blown up, and then Tarzan faces Mustache Guy in, and I am not making this up, a lightsaber duel.

Rocket Tarzan is obviously very different from the Bollywood movies of today; with all the narrow escapes and sudden twists and turns it's structured more like an old fashioned movie serial, like Commando Cody with occasional musical numbers. I'm not sure if my experience really counts as watching the movie, since I'm still not clear on what just happened, but on the other hand, I don't know if it would make much more sense even with subtitles. Either way, though, I'm still counting this as a dream fulfilled.