King Solomon’s Mines (1985) Cannon/Action-Adventure RT: 100 minutes Rated PG-13 (language, violence, offensive stereotypes) Director: J. Lee Thompson Screenplay: Gene Quintano and James R. Silke Music: Jerry Goldsmith Cinematography: Alex Phillips Release date: November 22, 1985 (US) Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone, Herbert Lom, John Rhys-Davies, Ken Gampu, June Buthelezi, Bernard Archard. Box Office: $15M (US)
Rating: * ½
Although King Solomon’s Mines is supposedly based on the original 1885 novel by H. Rider Haggard, this 1985 version is nothing more than a cheap knock-off of Raiders of the Lost Ark right down to the rousing theme by Jerry Goldsmith. It’s so unbelievably bad that it quickly becomes an unintentional comedy with its square-jawed hero, ditzy damsel-in-distress and cartoonish villains.
Is it any surprise that King Solomon’s Mines comes from Cannon? They were notorious for producing cheap knock-offs of popular genre flicks in the 80s. I’ve enjoyed several of their movies, but something like this is in a class all its own. It’s a bad movie, no question about it, but it’s not entirely unwatchable. What’s truly amazing is that somehow it managed to turn a small profit for producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.
I saw it over Thanksgiving weekend ‘85 at a Sunday afternoon matinee. It was the same weekend that saw Rocky IV and Santa Claus: The Movie open in theaters. That it managed to hold its own against these major studio biggies is some kind of miracle. There was a pretty sizable crowd at the showing I attended. I sat there hoping for the best. What I got wasn’t exactly the worst, but it came perilously close.
For openers, who’s going to buy Richard Chamberlain (The Thorn Birds) as a macho adventurer? He’s one of the last actors I would describe as rugged. He’s definitely no Harrison Ford, that’s for sure. This alone makes King Solomon’s Mines look like a big joke. What finally removes all credibility are the exaggerated ethnic stereotypes that serve as the villains of the story. It’s difficult to say which is worse, the knockwurst-munching German or the hookah-smoking Turk. However, I think the chanting and dancing African natives have them beat. I am astonished that the NAACP didn’t come down on this film. I guess they realized how unnecessary it would be to object to something so incapable of being taken seriously.
Adventurer-for-hire Allan Quatermain (Chamberlain) has been charged with the difficult task of finding the missing father (Archard, Krull) of anthropology expert Jesse Huston (Stone, Basic Instinct). He was onto something big in Africa when he went missing along with his assistant. It turns out he has a map leading to the fabled mines of King Solomon. Searching for a valuable Biblical artifact, where have we heard that before?
The intrepid pair learns Professor Huston has been captured by a German military expedition led by Colonel Bockner (Lom, the Pink Panther movies) and Dogati (Davies, Raiders of the Lost Ark) who are on the very same quest. If you want to talk about offensive stereotypes, get a load of this. The bald-headed German colonel barks orders at everybody, munches on knockwurst and forces one his men to carry a portable Victrola on his back so he can listen to his Wagner records. The Turkish baddie is a slave-trader who has his guys abduct Jesse and bring her to him wrapped in a carpet as he puffs away on his hookah.
Quatermain and Jesse chase these guys around the plains and jungles of Africa to retrieve her father. Then it’s a race to see who can get to the mines and all of their riches first. Along the way, our heroes encounter a tribe of cannibalistic natives who try to cook them in an enormous pot full of water and plastic vegetables. Moments later, they get captured by another tribe who tries to feed Quatermain to a bunch of hungry crocodiles while the screeching high priestess attempts to make a human sacrifice of Jesse.
They finally find their way into the caves of the mountain where the vast treasure lies. It’s one of those prolonged sequences where our heroes encounter many deadly booby-traps while the bad guys give chase. By this time, Bockner and Dogati are trying to kill each other which means we get several redundant scenes where a villain thought to be dead suddenly reappears. By this time, the movie has long since crossed the line into self-parody.
I suppose parody is the best way to approach King Solomon’s Mines although if that were truly the case, I would have preferred to see Leslie Nielsen play the lead. Either way, it’s impossible to take this as a serious action-adventure in the Indiana Jones mold. The studio spent $11M, but you wouldn’t know it from the cheap special effects. Look at the scene where Quatermain hangs precariously from a plane while Jesse tries to gain control of it. It’s obviously rear projection; any grade schooler will spot that immediately. The same goes for the scene where Quatermain’s native companion Umbopo (Gampu, The Wild Geese) fights a German bad guy atop a cross-country train. This might have gone unnoticed in the 30s and 40s, but audiences expected better in the 80s. Is director J. Lee Thompson (Firewalker) trying to pay homage to the cheesy adventure serials of the past?
Speaking of the train sequence, there’s this one ridiculous scene where Quatermain bursts into a car full of armed German soldiers. How does he get out of this sticky situation? He grabs a horn and leads them in a sing-along of “Camptown Ladies”. Gotta love Chamberlain’s doo-dahs! This part exemplifies how very wrong he is for the part. The guy is a joke. Harrison Ford never would have stood for this. Then there’s Sharon Stone …. yikes! She really is a terrible actress. No amount of hotness on her part can cover this up. The two leads have zero chemistry making their romantic scenes a complete and utter joke. Lom and Rhys-Davies play their roles like live-action cartoons. These are the kinds of villains one expects to see in a Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck cartoon.
The dialogue in King Solomon’s Mines is terrible. The characters actually say the following things with straight faces: “Turkish imbecile”, “knockwurst-eating hypocrite”, “cheap-suited camel jockey” and “towel-headed creep”. Who writes this stuff? Oh yeah, Gene Quintano, one of the co-writers of Treasure of the Four Crowns (the 1983 3-D Raiders clone) and several Police Academy installments.
For all of its complete idiocy, King Solomon’s Mines is one of those bad movies that you just have to laugh off as folly. It deserves the MST3K treatment it’s so damn goofy. It’s watchable to a point and you’ll know when that is. See it if you must, but don’t say I didn’t try and warn you beforehand.
