The film has Tarzan being dragged into help try and track down the son of a missing geologist by some reporters who parachute into the jungle to find him. Along the way they come up against an evil native who wants to seize control of his tribe.
I kind of shut off early when we see the young boys father trying to keep a leopard cub in the sleeping bag of his sleeping son. My twee alarms were going off. More alarms went off when the reporters dropped in on Tarzan with full on 1960's fashion in place and when we saw Rafer Johnson competing in tribal events that looked exactly like the Olympic events he won his medal for.
For me the film just doesn't work. Its too choppy and blocky and it suffers from the fact that the film is, like the others starring Mike Henry, thrashing about in an effort to be about something and to find it's way in the Tarzan sequence.
Admittedly the film has it's problems due to the trouble in shooting but even so the film never wholly works. Shot with the previous films in close proximity to each other (all three were done before CITY OF GOLD was released) Henry walked away from the film and the starring role in the TV series because he had had enough of the jungle dangers. I would like to think that he also did it because the films didn't really work. I'm guessing the producers were eyeing the TV series more than the films which suffered as a result.
While not an complete disaster, this isn't a film you'd really want to watch. It's more a time killer than a time passer and its the sort of thing I'll watch when nothing else is on TV rather than something I'd put on TV to watch.
A whimpering end to a great film series.
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