Trader Hornee

My Dad's favorite movie of all time is the 1931 Harry Carey African adventure "Trader Horn," and I think he would be both appalled and amused to learn that a 1970 skin-flick comedy had later been made based on it. Well, leave it to those maniacs at Something Weird to retrieve this one from obscurity, and give it a nice DVD treatment, too. In "Trader Hornee," Indiana detective Hamilton Hornee (pronounced "Horn") ventures to wildest Africa (an Africa that looks strangely like rural California) with his hotty redheaded secretary to locate an heiress who's been missing for 15 years. Accompanying them are the heiress' S&M-loving cousins, a doofus naturalist looking for the legendary white ape Nabuko, reporter Tender Lee, and a drunken safari guide. Anyway, this film mixes some very soft-core sex scenes with incredibly lame humor of the vaudeville-circuit calibre. Thus, when captured by the jive-talking Meshpokas tribe (I can almost hear all the Yiddish speakers out there collectively groaning about now!), Hornee tells them, "Wait, I'm a friend of Sammy Davis, Jr." The vast majority of the jokes fall equally flat (how did they ever manage to skip a line about "bushwhacking"?), although there are unintentional laffs in abundance. All four of the film's gals look pretty nice, however, and the picture, though filmed on the cheap, looks surprisingly decent, too. Despite the insipid humor, I was somehow never bored. As far as spoofs go, I suppose one could do a lot worse, and you will certainly be more than amused when the Meshpokas go into their choreographed native song and dance, I promise you! I found this dumb movie fun enough, although I'm still not in any hurry to tell my Dad of its existence...