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Trader Hornee
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| Year: |
1970
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Director: |
Jonathan Lucas
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| Stars: |
Buddy Pantsari, Julie Conners, John Alderman, Luanne Roberts, Elizabeth Knowles, Fletcher Davies, Brainerd Duffield, Deek Sills, Neal Henderson, Andrew Herbert, Bill Babcock, Ed Rogers, Bed Cadlett, Chuck Wells, Debra Rogers, David F. Friedman
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| Genre: |
Comedy, Sex, Trash, Adventure |
| Rating: |
  5 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Hamilton Hornee (Buddy Pantsari - the "e"s are silent) is a private detective who returns to the office one morning to discover his secretary, Jane Summers (Julie Conners) has just received a telephone call from the bank. She had expected the worst, but it turned out to be a good thing: an actual case for them to work on. The bank manager wishes them to travel to Africa to track down a missing heiress - but this girl, who should now be twenty-one years old, vanished years ago when she was little, after her parents were killed in the jungle. Can Hamilton rise to the occasion?
Blessed with one of the worst punning titles of all time, Trader Hornee was a sexploitation spoof of the venerable jungle adventure Trader Horn, which had been filmed fairly straight, the most celebrated version being the one which arrived in the thirties and ushered in an era of Tarzan pictures and Dorothy Lamour in a sarong. It centred around the tale of an expedition seeking a so-called White Goddess who reputedly ruled over a native tribe, but in this, although they kept the basic plotline, it was more an excuse for nudity, dodgy jokes and locations that were pretty obviously nowhere near Africa judging by the stock footage.
It was the brainchild of that overlord of sleazy movies, David F. Friedman, yet there was something oddly innocent here that didn't render it quite as seedy as it might have otherwise, as if Friedman was saying, yes, we know what you're here for, but we may as well have some fun with it while we're at it. Don't go in expecting brilliant performances and sky high production values and treat it as the silly fluff it was, and it was possible to tolerate, even quite enjoy, the daft goings-on that emerged from not regarding a classic book with anything like the reverence others had: after all, when it came down to it the story was ridiculous.
Tarzan tends to dominate the jungle when it came to movies, and there were references to him here, but Trader Hornee operated as a compendium of all the clichés of the jungle that were sent up with not exactly rapier wit, but an appealing can-do attitude that acknowledged nobody was going to watch this hoping to end up rolling around on the floor clutching their sides with the hilarity of it all. Nevertheless, Friedman, who wrote the script, did against the odds manage a few laughs from the cheerfuly impoverished entertainment that was on offer. The cast were patently under instruction not to take any of this remotely seriously, and you would be advised to do the same.
There are six in the party searching for the jungle queen, Hamilton and Jane, along with a reporter Tender Lee (Elizabeth Knowles), great white hunter Adler (Brainerd Duffield), and a sadomasochistic couple, Max (John Alderman) and Doris (Luanne Roberts), the male half of which is the missing girl's cousin and secretly wants her inheritance. Most of this lot used psuedonyms, as did the director, and the three main women wore bright red wigs presumably to make them less recognisable. Throw in a white gorilla which is not all it seems, and the only thing left to do was meet the missing person, who turns out to be Algona (Deek Sills, in her only film), a slim blonde who is happier staying with her jive talking subjects than considering returning to the States. All those ladies doffed their togs, although the men mostly kept their underwear on, and if this wasn't going to be anyone's idea of great cinema, it was innocuous enough to soothe the sense of cynicism that followed such efforts.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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