Other than a skinny-dip 45 minutes in, Bo's much-ballyhooed nude scenes are confined to the climax where she's painted by some natives, and then over the closing credits when she's topless and horsing around with C.J. John Derek was possibly the worst major filmmaker of the 1980s, and his staging of the action scenes here is beyond inept, always in slow-motion with some blurry effect. Bo plays his estranged daughter, who tags along and ends up abducted by Tarzan (a debuting Miles O'Keeffe), with Harris and a wildlife photographer (John Phillip Law) in pursuit. Harris never stops yelling about 'that son-of-a-bitch white ape!,' and it's arguably the worst performance of his career, and you know what? TARZAN THE APE MAN deserves it. Kurtz leading an expedition through the jungles of 1910 Africa to find the legendary 'white ape' known as Tarzan. Much of Marlon Brando's Irish-brogued performance in THE MISSOURI BREAKS feels like a tribute to his MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY co-star Harris, so it's possible Harris is repaying the favor here, perhaps intoxicated and seemingly making it up as he goes along but doing so at the top of his voice, like a bellowing Col. Perhaps it was a bad omen when the first bit of nudity we see in this is Richard Harris' junk dangling from under his nightshirt when he squats down into a river. Though incessant media hype and moviegoer curiosity made it a big hit (it opened in first place at the box office),TARZAN THE APE MAN is a tedious and impossibly boring Sri Lanka travelogue first and live-action Bo pictorial second, and for all the chatter at the time about how sexed-up this was, it's pretty limp in that department, pun intended. Opened 40 years ago this weekend, an anniversary that more or less marked the beginning of the end of post-10 Bo-mania, with the stunning Bo Derek becoming a willing participant in the implosion of her career at the hand of Svengali perv husband John Derek.

Tarzan the ape man 1981 ending