“You must be crazy! Or you’ve just been drinking a lot.”

Drake’s rating: This wasn’t part of a movie swap. I did this to myself.

Drake’s review: Tarzan has almost as long a history in film as he does in literature. While the first Tarzan novel was published in 1914 (following a magazine publication in 1912), the first film, Tarzan of the Apes, debuted just a few years later in 1918. Several sequels and serials followed during the Silent Era*, and as talkies took over the movie screens Olympic star Johnny Weissmuller cemented his status as Tarzan, turning out a dozen films as the lord of the jungle between 1932 and 1948.

That was the height of the character’s popularity in the movies, although Tarzan films continued to be regularly made for decades after, and every few years there’s a new attempt to bring the character to the screen.

So why am I bringing up Tarzan in a movie that doesn’t even feature the character in its title? Well, it’s because Zan: King of the Jungle isn’t just a quick rip-off of Tarzan made by some fly-by-night producers, he actually is Tarzan, living in the jungle in an unnamed country under witness protection to keep from being sued by the notoriously litigious Edgar Rice Burroughs estate and whoever may have had the film rights in 1969.

Originally titled Tarzán en la gruta del oro (Tarzan and the Golden Grotto, which is yet another alternate title for this flick), the names were changed to protect the not-so-innocent when the movie hit the U.S. market, and the name Zan made it fairly easy for the English dubbing to match what the actors were saying whenever the character was mentioned. And considering Tarzan had imitators going all the way back to the pulp era**, a not-so-subtle name change was all it took for Zan: King of the Jungle to fly under the radar just enough to avoid legal entanglements unbecoming of jungle royalty.

So the titular king of the jungle is here played by Steve Hawkes, whose sideburns steal the show. Saving a beautiful Amazon (Kitty Swan) from some gangsters who are looking for gold, Zan ends up taking a bullet and falling into a river. Luckily, his unsurprisingly anthropomorphic parrot talks a local prospector, Red Sullivan, into helping him and the two men become friends. They’re such good buds, in fact, that Zan gives Red some of the “yellow stones” he finds during his adventures.

Unfortunately Red is less-than-circumspect about his newfound riches and goes into town flashing his newfound wealth and buying drinks for anyone within earshot. That brings him to the attention of the gangsters, of course, and Red spills the beans, telling them that Zan’s still alive and that the jungle man knows where the gold is. That of course sets the gangsters on a collision course with Zan once again, and the king of the jungle has a few scores to settle…

Even in the world of Tarzan movies, which have historically been a very mixed bag, Zan: King of the Jungle is quite the low-budget affair. But for a Tarzan knock-off this is not at all surprising. There’s little in the way of a plot and the characterizations boil down to Zan good, gangsters bad, but that’s not so different from some of the officially licensed movies, either.

Still, though it’s a mere 78 minutes this one’s on the slow side. There’s even a subplot with Red’s daughter Mary (Krista Nell, The Million Eyes of Sumuru) arriving and hiring a semi-alcoholic young guide to eat up some screen time, but that bit just wanders about aimlessly for awhile before finally running into the main plot and by then you’re kind of wondering what Johnny Weissmuller was up to in 1969 and what his sideburns looked like, and if he had a parrot.

Physically at least, the Croatian-born Hawkes is a pretty good Tarzan. Muscular but not musclebound, he looks athletic enough to be climbing trees and swinging from vines. His acting range seems very limited and his lines are dubbed, but he at least has the benefit of avoiding the clunky “Me Tarzan, you Jane” dialogue that Weissmuller was too often saddled with. He can’t carry the movie, but the problem is that no one else can, either.

Except maybe the parrot.

*I’d review them, but I don’t want to make Justin’s head explode.

**Not to mention the fact that Tarzan himself is basically an update of Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli for an early 20th century audience.

Intermission!

• No, seriously, those are some sideburns.
• Sure, they have spears, and they outnumber him, but he’s ZAN!
• Honestly, having your parrot helping you cheat at poker is pretty unsportsmanlike for a lord of the jungle.
• If you’re trapped in a cage with a man in an ape costume, then obviously you’re going to fight with Styrofoam rocks.
• The pith helmet store does a booming business in this town.
• So the big action finale is about five seconds of Zan wrestling in the river with one of the gangsters. Excitement, thy name is not Zan: King of the Jungle.
• Splashing around in the water with an Amazon Queen is a good way to end a jungle king’s day.