What a waste of my time!!!

An action-packed slog

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Lex Barker dons the Tarzan trunks for the second time in what is a fun Tarzan adventure, even if it's just a bit too crammed with intentions for its own good. Vanessa Brown slips into Jane's short jungle skirt and Denise Darcel is also on hand to provide some extra sex pheromones; and to indulge in a girl on girl scrap with Jane! Cool!Plot is basically Tarzan out to rescue a bunch of femme natives from the clutches of some mad culty tribesmen led by Hurd Hatfield. There's a jungle disease issue to take care of as well, Cheetah's (owning the movie unsurprisingly) alcohol problem, and of course there's some baddies to be dispensed with which allows Barker to use his athleticism to great effect.Tarzan gets to be vocal, well more a case of muffled utterances really, and Lee Sholem directs it with economical assuredness. Come the end, baddies vanquished, Jane and Cheetah are smiling, and this Greystoke bloke is a hero again. Hooray! Good solid wholesome Tarzan froth. 6/10

Tarzan and the Slave Girl (1950) ** (out of 4) Incredibly flat entry was Lex Barker's second stint as Tarzan. This time out he must do battle with some weird lion-worshipers who are kidnapping women from local tribes because they are dying of a mysterious disease. Instead of getting proper medication, the tribe instead plans to repopulate their village with new women including Jane (Vanessa Brown). This second entry in the "new" RKO series is a pretty boring and uninteresting affair because the silly story could have worked as camp but sadly the material is just so poorly directed that you can't even laugh at it. I think the film gets off to a rather good start but this all goes down the tubes as soon as you see one of the men dying of some sort of fit. I'm not sure if the director could only film this scene once and they were stuck with whatever they got but the acting by this person is just so bad and his flopping around on the group so laughable that you can't help but wonder why no one ordered a second take. Things don't get much better from this point on as we see Tarzan and his friends (including Cheetah) walking down one trail after another trying to locate this mysterious tribe. This is part of the problem because this little adventure contains no excitement, no energy and certainly doesn't make for a very good time. The entire story involving the lion-worshipers is rather silly but I don't fault the film for this. After all, most of the plot lines in this series were rather silly but what really kills the picture is that the director simply doesn't add any life to what's going on. Baxter is just so-so in his role of Tarzan, which really isn't good considering he's the star. In an introduction I saw to the film it was said that Brown had an I.Q. of 165 but you certainly couldn't tell that by her performance. She comes off incredibly dumb like as Jane and it's easy to see why she wasn't brought back for a second picture. Hurd Hatfield is pretty forgettable as the main worshiper but Denise Darcel does bring some life and fight to the picture as the doctor's assistant who falls for Tarzan. TARZAN AND THE SLAVE GIRL runs a sluggish 74-minutes and sadly there's very little to be found here.

In Tarzan And The Slave Girl, Tarzan discovers yet another ancient civilization lost in the jungle, this one looks like some ancient Egyptians got lost in the jungle and took to worshiping lions. In one of the RKO Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan he was dealing with a group that worshiped leopards. The plots were getting sillier and sillier.In this one however a mysterious disease is killing off these Egyptian types and the answer for these folks who have no modern medicine is bring in women to replenish the population. But among the women they bring are Vanessa Brown playing Jane in this film and Denise Darcel who is nurse to jungle doctor Arthur Shields.Anthony Caruso here is the villain who wants to keep his crowd without knowledge of the outside world as he is planning a palace coup against Prince Hurd Hatfield. He's also got a score to settle with Tarzan who gave him a nasty scar while he was on his Pontipee mission.The Lex Barker films and the Weissmuller films for RKO were the worst of the Tarzan series. King Solomon's Mines and The African Queen would be coming out soon and these adventures done on a studio back lot weren't going to cut it with the movie-going public.Two things Tarzan And The Slave Girl does have going for it. The first is a dandy chick fight between Vanessa and Denise. The fight was a draw, but I'm surprised the two of them got in a face to face profile shot. Denise definitely won the rack contest, in fact I doubt those lost Egyptians saw anything built like her.The second was a neat running jungle fight between Tarzan and the group bringing medicine and looking for the captured women and a tribe that acted as a buffer between the Egyptians and the outside world. This tribe used poison blow gun darts and quite effectively. Very nicely staged.Still this was an Africa that never existed outside Hollywood sound stages.

Many people regard Lex Barker as Tarzan lite. I always thought he did a fine job. "Tarzan and the slave girl" presents two things that I really like in a Tarzan movie. 1. A lost civilization with a mysterious (although card-bord) temple. 2. Women with a lot of OOMPH! The actress that plays Lola is a real find. She has the shoulders of a line-backer, a hair-trigger temper and a French accent so thick you could spread it like jam. I like her. All in all, a fun little picture that delivers genuine All-American cheesy thrills.