Movie Details
| Title: | Tarzoon, The King of the Jungle | |
| Director: | Picha, Boris Szulzinger | |
| Year: | 1975 | |
| Genre: | Animated | |
| Times Seen: | 2 | |
| Last Seen: | 09.17.05 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 09.17.05 | Alamo Downtown | This Screening is part of event: QT6 For the second film of the Night, Robert Rodriguez came up to thank the sponsors and intro QT. Man, this guy has been working out. Anyway, after bringing him up on stage, QT turned and motioned for Rodriguez to stay... At this point, everyone who'd been at the 80s horror-thon started working themselves up. Quentin mentioned that they played a movie called Silent Night, Deadly Night, all of us vets started cheering. Tarantino then said that they were going to re-enact the first scene from that movie, with Rodriguez as the grandfather and Quentin as young Billy. They both got on their knees, RR started playing comatose, and what followed is probably the highlight of the entire festival for me. Rodriguez gave it up as well as I remember seeing a week ago, only forgetting to throw in a "BOYYYY" but other than that pitch-perfect. It was really something special to see. Afterward, Rodriguez explained that it was probably his favorite monologue in all of cinema and he hadn't seen it in a long time but the last time he did it was to scare the shit out of the Spy Kids kids when one of them mentioned looking forward to Christmas. He also mentioned that he's been hanging out at Quentin's house working on Grindhouse (tangential note: RR said that QT actually got a line idea for their trailer from one of the trailers played here during the fest... so when the Grindhouse trailer hits expect it to say "Rodriguez and Tarantino are back! but this time, they're Back TO Back!") and when he mentioned that he was gonna play SN,DN for us, he went right into it and Quentin was really surprised and impressed that he knew it so well. Surprised and impressed indeed. So after that, Quentin said that there was really nothing that could be said to prepare anyone for Tarzoon for those that haven't seen it. I'd agree, it really is better to just let it wash over you and appreciate the perverse surreality of it all. I was a little anxious about seeing it at 10:30 rather than midnight, but to my surprise the film was still really funny on that bizarre level. I think I appreciated Belushi's Perfect Master character even more. "Come on, douchebag, what's your name?" and the two-headed dude arguing to himself about whether certs was candy or not. Eric (AKA Quint) said he got a set of French Lobby cards off eBay but they haven't arrived yet. I really hope there's one of the phallus army generation conveyor belt... that'd be really special. |
| 09.09.05 | Alamo Downtown | This Screening is part of event: QT6 OK this one is just bizarre. Shown as a midnight gonzo movie after the Robert Vaughn secret agent double feature, QT gave a rundown of this movie: It's a french animated picture called Tarzoon that's basically a send-up of Tarzan. For the American version, National Lampoon and early SNL kingpin Michael O'Donoghue and Anne Beatts wrote the dialogue and got a bevvy of great comedians to supply voices, such as Bill Murray, Christopher Guest, and John Belushi as a beer-swilling kid who's enslaved a flock of seagulls to power his magic carpet, not to mention Johnny Weismuller Jr. to supply the broken english made famous by his father. So after it was all re-done and pretty much ready to release, the estate that controls the Tarzan property sued them so they had to rename the movie Shame of the Jungle. Rather than do any work however, they just blacked out any on-screen mention of "Tarzoon" in squiggling blobs of censorship and took any audio of the name being spoken and reversed it. So in the movie you get a lot of characters talking about "noozraT"... which made me chuckle every time. Why did they sue? Well it could be that this movie is really really lewd and bizarre. Tarzoon's johnson hangs out for practically the entire movie. A monkey even hangs on it at one point. An evil bald Queen with 14 breasts sends a legion of cockmonsters out to kidnap Tarzoon's love June for her hair. Yes, i said cockmonster. Late in the film, there's a sequence where it shows how they come about. Little babies fall into jars on a conveyor belt where they are repeatedly smushed down. With each smushing, their bodies get smaller and their dorks get bigger until finally an axe swoops down and separates the deflated baby from its militaristically animated block and tackle. Somehow, the cockmonsters also have assholes though. Anyway, they walk and run around on their balls and shrink down inside to hide and jump into condoms when alarms are raised and shoot acidic... well... you get the idea. The whole movie is foul like this, with really racist depictions of black dudes getting eated by crocodiles, an elephant getting his ass drilled out, a monkey fiddling with Junes nipples, and tons of other stuff that i've already pushed out of my mind. Just plain crazy. Along with QT, writer/directors Richard Linklater and Tim McCanlies were in the house tonight, as was actors Nicky Katt and Wiley Wiggins, Austin mainstay Louis Black, the entire AICN and AFS cadres, and the singer dude from Counting Crows, unless there's another guy with that haircut and that skin tone walking around town... which i guess there could be. I didn't want to go up and ask him if he was the Counting Crows dude just to say "cool" and walk away if i was right. |
