This totally skinny, but bruiseless archeologist gets lost in darkest, deepest Africa and his only daughter sets out to find him.  She sensibly decides that she must have some assistance in this venture, never having traveled in deepest, darkest Africa before.  So she hires Allan Quatermain to help her.  He has no designs on her bod, only on her dough - so he says.

 

They hack their way through an incredible jungle and arrive in a very busy city island. (It must be a city island because there is absolutely no way all those trucks and cars and busses could have hacked THEIR way through the jungle).  They get into some fights because they looked at people funny, and continue their trek to find Daddio.  When they do find Daddio, a strange guy in a Shriner's hat is hitting him on the elbow with a stick and insisting that he, "tell me".  Dad, on the other hand, while obviously in extreme pain from his elbow injury, keeps saying, "no". This scenario continues until Shriner hat guy's stick breaks, and then he gets mad again.  No one knows what happens to Dad after that, because the daughter (Jesse) and Quatermain continue their quest for a sacred gem in the mines.  They get pretty muddy and these guys who hang from trees appear and wash and iron their clothes and return them. About this time, Quatermain notices that Jesse cleans up good and decides that he probably can commit to her, at least for the length of the movie.

 

A bunch of natives catches them. Jesse says, "Oooh, how glad they are to see us.  They must be FRIENDLY natives".  She draws this conclusion because our friendly feathered friends are singing a song as they escort the two of them to dinner.  As it turns out, the song the natives were singing had very simple lyrics, "carrots or potatoes?".  The natives decided to compromise and have both vegetables with the main course (consisting of Quatermain and Jesse).  After Jesse figures out that they are in danger inside the giant stewpot of boiling veggies, Quatermain notices her see-through shirt and decides to save them by rocking the pot until it falls over.  Then, when a pair of lions checks out the turned-over pot, his first instinct is to feel-up Jesse. 

That being the case, the two finally get to the mines, and with each succeeding disaster, Jesse's shorts get shorter and shorter - with a really cool side slit and definitely necessary to the plot and it gives us Quatermain's motivation for following this chick into a booby-trapped mine filled with snakes and a killer hippo.

 

This movie is a "must see" for all lovers of adventure films and hippos.

M.G.