Very Cool!!!

Pretty Good

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Ever in search of adventure, Allan Quatermain agrees to join Jesse Huston on a mission to locate her archaeologist father, who has been abducted for his knowledge of the legendary mines of King Solomon. As the kidnappers, led by German military officer Bockner, journey into the wilds of Africa, Allan and Jesse track the party and must contend with fierce natives and dangerous creatures, among other perils.......The Cannon Group, arguably the finest makers of really cheesy movies that were churned out during the finest decade ever...........The wonderful Eighties.Here was their chance to try and emulate the success of one Indiana Jones, but without the budget, it was always going to be a hard sell, and the fact that it's adapted by such a wonderful piece of art, was going to make it all the more difficult, so they don't even begin to try, and this is why it's just so watchable for all the wrong reasons.The predominant problem with the film is the fact that Chamberlain isn't even trying with the character of Quartermain, he's obviously been told by the producers to do his best Harrison Ford impression, and while he's perfectly average in the film, that's all he is, a poor mans Harrison Ford, and he just doesn't put any effort into the actions sequences or the one liners, he just looks like Ford a bit, and moves like a constipated middle aged man with a hangover.Stone fares little better, but to be fair on her, she was at the beginning of her career, and she just plays the eye candy in peril.But the mind boggles as to why Herbert Lom decided to appear in this. Here is a man who is such a prolific actor in his own right, he didn't need to be in something so absurd. It's like imaging Charlton Heston appearing in a Van Damme movie..................oh wait a minute....But there is a lot of fun to be had. The special effects are so bad that the green screen should have been credited as a main character, and then there's the escape in the large cumbersome cooking pot, and the spider, one of the poorest special effects ever committed to the big screen.See it for all the wrong reasons, it's a film for lovers of bad movies, it's nothing seriously awful, because it's so stupid, but the sight of Chamberlain riding rail tracks like water skis does stay with you.......

I don't know why this movie was given such a low rating. I loved this movie as a kid and watching it on netflix was just as entertaining. People have to remember that this wasn't supposed to be better than Indiana Jones or compete with it. Its supposed to put a humorous spin on it. From the theme song, German bad guys, Quarterman's get up, its all jokes.Take Indiana Jones, add a truck load of jokes, sprinkle in some bad effects and this is what you add up with. A good movie to waste time with!Enjoy it for what it is and don't expect more.

I downloaded "The People of the Mist" to my Kindle by accident (another story by H. Rider Haggard) and loved it. I then learned that he also wrote King Solomon's Mines and that in actuality the Alan Quatermain character was the inspiration for Indiana Jones. The idiotic movie, as I remember it, couldn't possibly be any more loosely based on the novel. I haven't watched the movie in maybe 20 years, and I almost want to watch it now to see how far off from the novel it was. It was a farce and I'm sure that's not how Haggard intended it. I could go on and on about the characters that were missing and the story being not even remotely similar. I don't recall Sir Henry, Good, Ignosi, Gagool, King Twala, the whole thing about the battle to restore Ignosi as king, them getting trapped in the mine when gagool shut the stone wall, etc, etc. This is kind of annoying that you have to submit a 10 line review and that it takes 2-3 days to be posted. Not that what I'm posting here is interesting or anybody will ever care what I have to say. I just finished reading the book and wanted to say how absolutely dreadful and completely unrelated to the book the movie was. Is this 10 lines yet?

H. Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines" has been filmed a number of times, but this is the only version I have ever seen. It is only very loosely based on the original novel; a greater influence seems to have been the first two episodes of the Indiana Jones franchise. The action is brought forward from the 1880s to the time of the First World War in order to make the main villain a German; "Raiders of the Lost Ark" had been set in the 1930s with Nazi villains. Haggard's Allan Quatermain becomes an action hero based on Indy himself, complete with bush hat (although without the bullwhip). Like Indy, Quatermain has a glamorous young female companion, Jessie Huston (who bears certain similarities to Willie in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom"). His male companions from the original novel, apart from the faithful African servant Umbopa, disappear.The 1980s are sometimes regarded as the decade which gave birth to the concept of political correctness, but there is little evidence of it in this film. (There is not a lot of evidence of it in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" either). For a film made in 1985, "King Solomon's Mines" achieves the difficult task of being, by a considerable margin, less politically correct than its source novel, published exactly one hundred years earlier. Haggard is never entirely free of late-Victorian assumptions about race, but he does treat his African characters with dignity and allows them major roles in his novel as heroes and heroines, not merely as villains. He even allows himself a romance between the African maiden Foulata and the white Englishman Captain Good. Interracial romances might have been acceptable to readers in 1880s England, but cinema audiences in 1980s America seem to have been more puritanical on this point. Neither Foulata nor Good appears in the film, and Quatermain's love-interest is supplied by the white Jessie, played by a young Sharon Stone. American squeamishness about mixed-race romance does not appear to have diminished in the quarter-century since 1985; in the recent film version of "Around the World in Eighty Days" Phileas Fogg's love-interest was a white Frenchwoman, not an Indian woman as in Jules Verne's novel. The most offensive thing abut the film, however, is the treatment of the African tribe, the Kakuanas. In Haggard's version they may have been noble savages, but here they are portrayed as ignoble ones, bloodthirsty cannibals who love to cook white people in a huge iron cauldron. This same old cartoon cliché comes up in the 1950s movie "Gentleman Marry Brunettes", but at least there its offensiveness is somewhat mitigated by its being presented in the context of a stage show; in "King Solomon's Mines", by contrast, the film actually appears to be suggesting that this is how real Africans behave. Ethnic stereotyping is not confined to Africans; we also have a treacherous, sadistic Turk and a ruthless, bullying German colonel. The film's problems are not confined to its racial attitudes. It was evidently made on a much lower budget than the Indiana Jones films, and the action sequences and special effects are not in the same class. The story is frequently illogical, confusing or both. Richard Chamberlain makes a lightweight action hero compared to Harrison Ford and Sharon Stone does not show any evidence of the qualities which would later make her a major star, other than her sex appeal which is much on display. About halfway through the film someone obviously thought that Sharon was not showing enough of her sex appeal, as it is notable that throughout the later scenes her shorts gradually get shorter and tighter, until she ends up wearing a pair of minuscule hot-pants which in the 1910s would probably have got their wearer arrested for indecency. Male viewers, however, might as well enjoy the sight of Sharon's legs; there is precious little else in this movie to keep anyone amused. The only thing that surprises me is that the film-makers evidently thought highly enough of the film to follow it with a sequel "Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold" It is sad to think that the director J. Lee Thompson was once responsible for films as good as "Yield to the Night", "Ice-Cold in Alex" and "Cape Fear". 3/10