Jungle Rot

By RICHARD CORLISS

TARZAN, THE APE MAN Directed by John Derek Screenplay by Tom Rowe and Gary Goddard

Bo Derek is an engineering marvel --translucent eyes, enigmatic smile, buoyant breasts on a lithe, lovely frame. But there is a stillness, an emptiness to Bo's beauty that suggests that her proper medium may well be a Playboy photo spread. In movement, in movies, beauty is not enough--not even for a sex goddess. It must be animated by a glimmer of spirit, experience, desire. Inside the Bo ideal should be a real woman. Not yet. Not at all. She is form without content.

Now Bo, as producer and star, and her husband John, as director and cinematographer, have basted together a new Tarzan, which the descendants of Author Edgar Rice Burroughs tried futilely to suppress. The story is familiar and faithful: Jane Parker (Bo) and her great white hunter father (Richard Harris) trek through the jungle and find the Ape Man (Miles O'Keeffe). But the plot is so much crinoline for Bo to shuck before cavorting au naturel with Tarzan or monkeying around with wildlife.

"I wallow in me!" trumpets Harris, and he does indeed: he wades hippo-deep through the rank mud of his loopy monologues. The generously muscled O'Keeffe utters not an intelligible word--only Tarzan's patented bull-elephant yodel. As for Bo's acting, she sucks in her stomach to look pretty and chews her cuticles to suggest fear. Alas, all the displays of Bo's body cannot divert attention from the ludicrous ineptness of the enterprise. Nothing breaks a tumid erotic spell faster than giggling.

--By Richard Corliss

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