Trader Hornee (1970)
This is a pretty forgettable T&A jungle epic that made you wish you were
watching something
like Jane and the Lost City or The Perils of Gwendoline instead. Like those two movies, you
had pitiful attempts at humor, absurd attempts at acting, and a general sense
that any danger
presented wasn't to be taken seriously. Unlike those two movies, this one
looked like it had
been filmed in some large city park. These people are supposed to be in Africa
or somewhere,
but the only thing they could come up with is some stock footage of African
wildlife, a leopard
on a leash that they trotted out periodically, and native huts that looked like
they were
purchased from Gilligan's Island's garage sale. The really big problem here seemed to be
the lack of anything much happening for most of the film's 84 minute run time.
You would think
that a jungle safari involving several people with high sex drives would
provide a lot chills
and thrills, but most of the time was spent babbling and the film makers didn't
bother to come
up with anything interesting for their wooden (and sometimes stiff - hahaha)
characters to take
part in. Things begin at the run down detective agency of Hamilton Hornee. We quickly
learn
that the last two letters of Mr. Hornee's name are silent, making the proper
pronunciation,
"horn." This utterly witless joke is repeated about eight times by various
characters
(including a talking crocodile) where someone looks at another character or
into the camera and
wonders if that is really his name. Not funny. Hornee has a secretary whose name is Jane
Summers. Hornee, being the upstanding employer he is, refers to her as sultry
and tries feeling
her up whenever he comes back to the office. She seems to play hard to get
until he promises to
take her along to the bank with him to find out what big case the bank wants
him to
investigate. Then she becomes as easy to lay as self-stick floor tiles. When we arrive at the
bank, the bank president tells Hornee and Sultry that he needs them to go
Africa on a missing
persons case. He tells them the tale of these two rich boobs that go to Africa
with their five
year old daughter and get themselves killed. The daughter was never accounted
for and the bank
has twenty-five million dollars of the parents' money that is supposed to go to
the daughter
once she hits 21 they need to know whether she's dead or alive. It's nice
that no one has bothered to think about checking into her safety for the last
fifteen years.  The missing girl's name is Prentice and if they can't find her or she's dead,
then all the money goes to her cousin Max. Hornee and Sultry will not be taking
this journey alone though. Max and his wife, the lesbian-masochist Doris, is
coming along for the ride. Also going is a reporter named Tender Lee and some
dude named Stanley Livingston.
Livingston is going in an attempt to find the white gorilla that's reputed to
roam around those parts named Nabucco. Livingston is a brainiac who spends a
lot of his time examining insects while these two naked girls constantly plead
for him to come back to bed. One of them insists on calling him "daddy" as
well. He's an old skinny guy and he spends most of his time on the trip hitting
on the reporter to no avail. If any of this makes any sense, you must be
related to writer/producer David F. Friedman or something. Once over there, their guide will be an old drunk named Kenya Adler. His funny
gag that is repeated over and over is that he keeps shooting at stuff and
missing. Wow-ee! Pass the oxygen! I'm having a hard time breathing! The first bit of business in Africa involves a really cheap looking bar set
where Hornee gets himself into a fight. How cheap is this movie? Well, during
the bar fight, we get a look at a table just before someone gets thrown into
it. It is the smallest, cheapest looking thing with two little bottles set on
it on either end of the table and nothing else. Then some dude breathes on it
and he and the table collapse in a gigantic heap. Hornee gets himself beat down
pretty good and I can't even recall what the point of the scene was, but it
does establish this Hornee guy as being a complete wuss with the personality of Mama's Family star Ken Berry. They should have got Mama to lead the expedition. She was the
toughest broad in all of Raytown! After the lowest budget bar fight you're ever
likely to see, all these horny toads set off on the expedition to find little
Prentice. Along
the way they pick up some natives to haul all their suitcases which include Max
and Doris'
various riding crops and other instruments vital to their alternative
lifestyle. Glad to see
that they packed the essentials. The actual expedition is fairly unremarkable. The drunken
Kenya shoots at stuff and misses, Sultry and Tender decide to go skinny
dipping, refusing to
allow Trader Hornee to go along (he wants to keep an eye on things and make
sure nothing
happens to the gals), and Max smacks Doris around and she likes it. The movie has this habit,
and it gets more pronounced as things go along, of trying to be funny with the
black people in
the movie. I suppose this was their vain attempt to be hip or relevant or
whatever, but most of
the time it comes off very badly. Like the classic scene where the natives who
are hauling
around their luggage and sex toys get treated to their first taste of
watermelon. It's funny
you see, because they've never had watermelon before! And we all know that
black people usually
have watermelon all the time! No wait, that can't be what the movie was trying
to say, right?  That's one of the scenes where you wince and urge the film makers to hurriedly
get on
with the lesbo scene. This is where Doris shows up at Tender's tent and tries
to get hooked up
with her. They manage to screw this scene up as well, deciding that now would
be
the perfect time to practice some of their community college film school
tricks. This results
in these idiotic shots where the color is all whacky and there's these fast
cuts and you don't
know what's going on except that the most exciting part of the movie is surely
passing you by.
I guess it really wasn't that big of crime. The women involved are strictly
seventies type
women. If you're a veteran of these films, you'll know what that means.
I would also note that
on a strictly aesthetic level that all these women on this expedition all have
the same
atrocious fire-engine red hair. I didn't stick around for the audio commentary
(memo to film
makers: why put an audio commentary on a movie that I could barely sit through
once? See alsoThe Trial Of Billy Jack .) so maybe there was a reason,
like it would really make the blonde hair of Algona stick out. Algona? Who's Algona, you ask? Well, if you're from the MonsterHunter's neck of
the woods, it's a town in the northern most part of Iowa that no one but lost
Minnesotans would ever visit. In this flick however, she is the blonde goddess
that rules this part of Africa. The nastiest tribe in all of Africa, the
Meshpokas, worship her as a their supreme leader and do whatever she wants.
She's also about 20 years old and is the only white chick in the area, leading
to a fair amount of speculation by just about everyone in the group that Algona
must be her Indian name or something and that her real name is Prentice. Somehow our group of searchers run into the Meshpokas and get captured by them.
The Meshpokas are fearsome warriors who have their faces painted and do a lot
of dancing. In fact, once they've been captured and brought back to a village,
the Meshpokas start line dancing before the arrival of Algona. Algona makes
her appearance and she's one of those long blonde haired things in a leopard
bikini that all of us know populates the most isolated parts of Africa (along
with dinosaurs and lost cities). Once she appears, the Meshpokas bust out into a cheer for Algona straight out
of a high school pep rally (Goooooo Algona!) complete with hand gestures. That
would be the highlight of the movie and actually brought a brief smile to my
otherwise sullen features. All this time, the great white ape of the area, Nabucco has been making
periodic appearances. The first time you see this dude, you remark to yourself
that that is the single worst ape costume I have ever seen in a movie. The
thing gaps like an ill-fitting suit whenever Nabucco jumps around. How anyone
who saw the thing could have mistaken it for a real albino gorilla (is there
such a thing?) instead of the cheap rental costume it actually was is beyond
me. And then it turns out at the end of the movie that Nabucco was really a guy
in a costume after all! Okay, I actually have a little experience in this whole giant white ape
situation, believe it or not. Several years ago, I was up at one of the state
universities. I had gone up to crash frat parties and beat up college kids with
some of my buddies . Well, we got up there early, so I just hung out walking
around the neighborhoods just off campus where all those spoiled rich kids buy
their drug paraphernalia from those hole-in-the-wall head shops that populate
the area like a colony of genital warts on a sorority girl, when all of a
sudden out of the corner of my eye, I spot something out of the ordinary. I
looked and by god if it wasn't a giant white gorilla walking down the sidewalk!
Really! He was headed up toward the downtown area and I figured he must have a
room booked at the Holiday Inn or something. Now I was never closer than across
the street, but I never once for a second thought it was a real white gorilla!
And this guy's costume was just as good as the one in this movie. So that's how
I can affirmatively tell you that the whole guy-in-the-white-gorilla-suit thing
doesn't pass muster - because I've lived it!  It turns out that Algona's policy of dealing with intruders
is to kill them after three days of torture. This reminds me of the punchline
to one of my
favorite jokes. It goes like this: "death by booga booga!" Ahh, man that kills
me every time I
hear that one!
So they tie everyone up to stakes and then Hornee is brought to Algona's
private hut and she and him hook up (whoa - that's some torture) and Hornee
immediately forgets that not more than 70 minutes ago he was in bed proposing
to his secretary. Then Doris gets brought in and tries to work some of her
feminine magic on Algona, but once you've had a dude in nasty baby blue briefs,
it kind of spoils you for all that try and follow. Max goes in there and tries
to kill her. He gets put in a big net above a pit of really lazy snakes that
just sort of lay there and barely move or hiss. I have no idea why all these
people were being taken into her cabin, but soon it all becomes moot when
Nabucco shows up (he's been skulking around the huts stealing bananas and also
trying to steal some gold!). Algona has a whole bunch of Nazi gold that she's been keeping. You know, there
was a time when the idea of lost Nazi gold sounded like it made for a
can't-miss adventure movie, but now thanks to films like this one and Oasis of the Zombies, I take any mention of the lost loot with great trepidation (about the same as
when I hear "Paul Naschy" and "werewolf" in the same sentence). It turns out that Nabucco was really an old Nazi in disguise all along and he
was just looking
for his gold. Algona then sets everyone free, but keeps Hornee for herself. She
and Hornee
swing off together on a vine and that solves the case of The Missing Heiress.
No, wait, did
that solve anything? Anyway, the movie is pretty limp T&A. I suppose the jungle motif is a welcome
change from the surfers, centerfold-eating plants, and Italian castles that
usually populate Something Weird fare, but there was no imagination in
utilizing their surroundings. The guy who played Hornee was about the blandest
leading man you'll ever see. He wasn't much of an adventurer or a private eye
and didn't seem to do much more than leer at various women and be the butt of
jokes about his inane name. I really had a hard time remembering a whole lot of what went on (there was a
remarkably poorly photographed catfight between Sultry and Algona that utilized
still shots for no apparent reason) or caring about anything I could remember.
It's a shame too, because I think we all see the potential in a really well
done skin flick/jungle safari romp. I still look at the cover art on this DVD
and can't believe how lame the whole thing was. Something Weird didn't even
come through with their usual bumper crop of extras (though they still give you
more than the film deserved). This is one of their releases that you can skip
or at least put at the bottom of your list.
|