Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold

The second movie with Allan Quatermain from Cannon Films is unfortunately also the first to be visibly impacted by the company’s incipient financial problems. The sequel to the relatively successful King Solomon’s Mines was supposed to be an opulent adventure with elements of fantasy, but in the end it is a hopelessly empty shell of a movie with obviously missing special-effects shots and action money shots that should have been filmed by the second crew or created by an effects studio – this is most obviously apparent in the lion-attack sequence, where the shooting of the lion is left out, and the passage involving an underground river, in which the characters look in wonder at something that viewers cannot see. The few shots with effects, without which the narrative wouldn’t work, are hopelessly cheap and sloppy, the culmination of which is futile animatronic creatures. The budget cuts are also manifested in other areas, e.g. the music being limited to essentially a single motif, which plays even in scenes where it doesn’t suit the atmosphere at all. In addition to the unfortunate consequences of financial restrictions, the film is also adversely affected by a fundamental change in style compared to the first Quatermain film. Though King Solomon’s Mines was made in response to Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone, thanks to its burlesque styling it was not merely a parasite, but rather the start of a distinctive franchise. Unfortunately, in the pursuit of profit and perhaps faced with grumbling viewers who didn’t accept Quatermain’s slapstick because they doltishly expected another Indy, the filmmakers tried to approximate the competition with the follow-up. However, the desired epic and only slightly exaggerated adventure simply didn’t happen because of the aforementioned budget cuts and the result is a futile dud that foreshadows the unfortunate fate of Cannon Films. (11/10/2015)