King Solomon's Mines

_**No-holds-barred send-up of Indiana Jones with Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone**_

In the early 1900s a beautiful blonde, Jesse Huston (Sharon Stone), hires white hunter/adventurer Allan Quartermain (Richard Chamberlain) to find her father who went missing during his expedition to find the fabled King Solomon’s Mines in southeast Africa. Herbert Lom and John Rhys-Davies are on hand as heavies.

Many moons ago I saw clips of “King Solomon’s Mines” (1985) and wrote it off as a campy knockoff of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), which of course was hugely successful and inspired several immediate imitations, like “Romancing the Stone” (1984) and “Firewalker” (1986). I thankfully finally decided to give it a chance because, while it IS a knockoff of “Raiders,” it’s the best I’ve seen so far. It’s at least as entertaining as “The Mummy” (1999), albeit not a blockbuster like that film.

Before you check it out, you have to be braced for a Grade B send-up with the corresponding preposterous frolics. Yes, it’s like Indiana Jones, but more over-the-top with a lower budget. If you can get on board, this is a wildly entertaining fun-adventure flick that’s colorful, cartoonish and thrilling with impressive African locations. It bends over backwards to amuse with Victoria Falls, jungle portages, market-place romps, steam-engine escapades, wild animals (lions, crocs, snakes and a colossal spider), threatening cannibals, a hideous witch-queen, deadly swamps, hellish caves and more. I should add that the spider is only a few notches above the ultra-cheese you’d see on Gilligan’s Island.

On the female front, Stone is stunning before she became famous and I’m not even a fan. The creators don’t fail to display her beauty in a tasteful way as her shorts get shorter and shorter. She has magnificent legs.

The film runs 1 hour, 40 minutes, and was shot in Zimbabwe.

GRADE: B+

H. Rider Haggard's "She" and "King Solomon's Mines" novels have proved the inspiration for loads of action adventures over the years, but I doubt even he would appreciate this derivative effort. In a style that's more akin to "Carry on Quatermain", we meet "Jesse" (Sharon Stone) who is trying to track down her lost long father. He set off into the jungles of ancient Sheba trying to find the legendary mines full of jewels. She engages the help of the legendary hunter "Quatermain" (Richard Chamberlain) and off they set on their quest. Meantime, the megalomanic Bosch colonel "Bockner" (Herbert Lom) has engaged the services of the duplicitous "Dogati" (John Rhys-Davies) for exactly the same purpose - and so it's a race! To be fair to Chamberlain, though a hero in the style of Stewart Granger, Harrison Ford or Sir Cedric Hardwicke he isn't, he does look like he's enjoying himself here in this mess of film as he chucks his dynamite hither and tither. Lom is also hamming it up as if he were back in his full "Pink Panther" pomp, but it's Stone who really let's the side down. She just doesn't seem to enter into the spirit of this romp at all enthusiastically. She's not got the enthusiasm of a Karen Allen nor the slightly aloof dignity of a Deborah Kerr and really contributes very little. JR-D is always in hIs element with these kind of roles and takes to it like a croc to water; a considerably more animated one than the actual ones we see that mix archive ferociousness with real time valerian. It hits the ground running with loads of adventures, but the CGI is pretty obvious before a denouement that's just crying out for a song. It's entertaining, in a perverted sort of fashion, but could never be described as good.

King Solomon’s Mines (1985) is a fictional action-adventure film. For the duration of its 100-minute runtime, I could accept the reality of its titular premise — if only it made internal sense. The first obvious question is, why would an Israelite monarch’s mines be in Africa?

The question had come up long before the movie was released. According to the Bible, King Solomon imported his gold from Ophir, a land that John Milton’s Paradise Lost identifies with Sofala in Mozambique. First of all, both the Bible and Paradise Lost are as fictional as King Solomon’s Mines. Second, that would mean Solomon’s very own gold would be in Jerusalem; the gold mines in Ophir would have belonged to the locals, or at least their rulers. Third, the film features diamond mines. D’oh!

The movie was shot in Zimbabwe — where, in 1871, German explorer Karl Mauch decided that the ruins of Great Zimbabwe bespoke the work of Phoenician or Israelite settlers, perhaps even on the orders of Solomon himself. Mauch, British archaeologist James Theodore Bent, and others felt that Indigenous Africans were too dumb and lazy to have built the ancient city. David Randall-MacIver, J. F. Schofield, and Gertrude Caton-Thompson eventually proved them wrong.

The film doesn’t mention any of that. On the one hand, it would negate the premise. On the other, the filmmakers didn’t have a very high opinion of non-whites either. Consider Kassam, played by Israeli actor Shaike Ophir (no relation). The hero, Allan Quatermain (Richard Chamberlain), and his romantic interest, Jesse Huston (Sharon Stone), call Kassam a “camel jockey” and a “towel-headed creep,” and then they indirectly kill him — Kassam dies from holding on too long to a dynamite stick that Quatermain lit.

Even “good” Africans are the butt of jokes. Quatermain’s black sidekick, Umbopo (Ken Gampu) will turn out to be a great tribal chief — yet “he doesn’t trust anything that moves without eating grass.” Consequently, while Quatermain and Jesse ride in a car, Umbopo runs in front of it. And when they all get on a train — literally on it —, Umbopo covers his eyes in fear.

The filmmakers’ view of native Africans as a backward people is cemented with the introduction of the Obugwa, a tribe whose members literally live upside down.

The film’s portrayal of cannibalism fares much better because it’s so silly that you just know there’s no way the filmmakers thought that’s how it actually works. Quatermain and Jesse are thrown in a comically oversized cooking pot. They escape by rocking it back and forth until it falls on its side. The sight of the pot rolling downhill is glorious, and the shots of the leads tumbling inside of it are priceless — and that’s saying something of a film that already looks a lot better than the majority of recent examples of the genre due to its cinematography, location shooting, and practical effects.

King Solomon’s Mines could have used more of that. It’s not enough that no one should take the movie seriously — they should have made sure that nobody ever would.