{"id":1383,"date":"2024-07-28T06:14:23","date_gmt":"2024-07-28T06:14:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=1383"},"modified":"2024-10-14T00:44:24","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T04:44:24","slug":"king-solomons-mines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/07\/28\/king-solomons-mines\/","title":{"rendered":"King Solomon\u2019s Mines"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"King Solomon\u2019s Mines <\/strong>(1985)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cannon\/Action-Adventure\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 100 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (language, violence, offensive stereotypes)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: J. Lee Thompson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Gene Quintano and James R. Silke\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Jerry Goldsmith\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Cinematography: Alex Phillips\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: November 22, 1985 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone, Herbert Lom, John Rhys-Davies, Ken Gampu, June Buthelezi, Bernard Archard.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $15M (US)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: * \u00bd<\/p>\n

\u00a0Although King Solomon\u2019s Mines<\/strong> 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\u2019s so unbelievably bad that it quickly becomes an unintentional comedy with its square-jawed hero, ditzy damsel-in-distress and cartoonish villains.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Is it any surprise that King Solomon\u2019s Mines<\/strong> comes from Cannon? \u00a0They were notorious for producing cheap knock-offs of popular genre flicks in the 80s. I\u2019ve enjoyed several of their movies, but something like this is in a class all its own. It\u2019s a bad movie, no question about it, but it\u2019s not entirely unwatchable. What\u2019s truly amazing is that somehow it managed to turn a small profit for producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I saw it over Thanksgiving weekend \u201885 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\u2019t exactly the worst, but it came perilously close.<\/p>\n

\u00a0For openers, who\u2019s going to buy Richard Chamberlain (The Thorn Birds) as a macho adventurer? He\u2019s one of the last actors I would describe as rugged. He\u2019s definitely no Harrison Ford, that\u2019s for sure. This alone makes King Solomon\u2019s Mines<\/strong> look like a big joke. What finally removes all credibility are the exaggerated ethnic stereotypes that serve as the villains of the story. It\u2019s 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\u2019t come down on this film. I guess they realized how unnecessary it would be to object to something so incapable of being taken seriously.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Adventurer-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?<\/p>\n

\u00a0The 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Quatermain and Jesse chase these guys around the plains and jungles of Africa to retrieve her father. Then it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0They finally find their way into the caves of the mountain where the vast treasure lies. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I suppose parody is the best way to approach King Solomon\u2019s Mines<\/strong> although if that were truly the case, I would have preferred to see Leslie Nielsen play the lead. Either way, it\u2019s impossible to take this as a serious action-adventure in the Indiana Jones mold. The studio spent $11M, but you wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s obviously rear projection; any grade schooler will spot that immediately. The same goes for the scene where Quatermain\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

\u00a0Speaking of the train sequence, there\u2019s 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 \u201cCamptown Ladies\u201d. Gotta love Chamberlain\u2019s doo-dahs!\u00a0 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\u2019s Sharon Stone \u2026. 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The dialogue in King Solomon\u2019s Mines<\/strong> is terrible. The characters actually say the following things with straight faces: \u201cTurkish imbecile\u201d, \u201cknockwurst-eating hypocrite\u201d, \u201ccheap-suited camel jockey\u201d and \u201ctowel-headed creep\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0For all of its complete idiocy, King Solomon\u2019s Mines<\/strong> is one of those bad movies that you just have to laugh off as folly. It deserves the MST3K treatment it\u2019s so damn goofy. It\u2019s watchable to a point and you\u2019ll know when that is. See it if you must, but don\u2019t say I didn\u2019t try and warn you beforehand.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

King Solomon\u2019s Mines (1985)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cannon\/Action-Adventure\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 100 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (language, violence, offensive stereotypes)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: J. Lee Thompson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Gene Quintano and James R. Silke\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Jerry Goldsmith\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Cinematography: Alex Phillips\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: November 22, 1985 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone, Herbert Lom, John Rhys-Davies, Ken Gampu, June Buthelezi, Bernard Archard.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $15M […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1661,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,27,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-adventure","category-b-movies","category-guilty-pleasures"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/King-Solomons-Mines-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1383"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1961,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions\/1961"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}