TARZAN AND THE TRAPPERS (1958)
Article 3292 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-30-2010
Posting Date: 8-19-2010
Directed by Charles F. Haas, Sandy Howard and H. Bruce Humberstone
Featuring Gordon Scott, Eve Brent, Rickie Sorensen
Country: USA
What it is: Tarzan movie

Tarzan must deal with illegal trappers, a safari for a lost city, and a hunter intent on capturing him.

I was tempted to dismiss this one as a Tarzan movie at its most uninspired, but the episodic nature of the movie began to make me suspect that it wasn’t really intended as a movie at all. And, sure enough, it was cobbled together from three episodes of an unsold TV series, though it does look as if the three episodes are at least somewhat related. It’s a pretty humdrum affair all around; the story does little new or interesting with the Tarzan idea, and it all feels rather uncompelling. What I like best is that it keeps the Cheta antics to a minimum (it even allows Cheta to heroically save Jane’s life in one of the opening scenes), and I do rather like the plot idea in which a hunter decides to track down the most dangerous animal in the world (see THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME) in the person of Tarzan, even if the movie makes little use of the idea in the final analysis. The fantastic content is little more than the marginal fantasy content of the Tarzan series. This is not essential Tarzan viewing.