Memorable, crazy movie

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Tarzan must deal with a group of illegal trappers, an expedition to a lost city in search of treasure & a hunter attempting to hunt him down as the ultimate prey.Tarzan and the Trappers was a 1958 attempt at making a new stab at a Tarzan franchise. This feature was cobbled together from three episodes of an unsold TV series & edited together to resemble a proper film. However it didn't entirely work. The episodic nature of the film's plot can be blamed for the lack of conviction or even adding anything new to the franchise. But the actors do a fair bit of work to sell their otherwise one-dimensional characters to the viewer. Gordon Scott makes a passable Tarzan & even gets the iconic yell right but the remainder of the cast are hovering between mediocre & downright stilted. The action scenes are hampered by the low budget & the motivations for the villains are sketchy at best.

After years of producing Tarzan films for the big screen, producer Sol Lesser decided that a television series might be in order. This film which did get some limited release on the big screen was intended for the small. You can clearly see where the commercial breaks were intended.It's also a step backward in terms of recognizing the emerging Africa which later Gordon Scott films did. Besides Scott the cast included Eve Brent as Jane and Rickie Sorensen as Boy.The two stories are only connected by the fact that the villains are brothers. In the first Tarzan stops a trapper from taking animals from his turf the jungle. He turns him over to the authorities. In the second story the first villain's brother challenges Tarzan to a jungle duel where Scott will be hunted like jungle prey. The most neophyte film fan will recognize The Most Dangerous Game as the source for the plot.That one actually could have and in fact was partially the source of a later big screen Tarzan film, Tarzan's Greatest Adventure. That one happens to be one of my favorites in the Tarzan series. This one is just a pale imitation.

Gordon Scott's second outing as the eponymous Edgar Rice Burroughs hero shares a lot in common with a traditional Johnny Weissmuller "Tarzan" movie. First, the Lord of the Jungle speaks in choppy sentences. Second, Tarzan has no back story relating to how he came to Africa. Third, co-directors Charles Haas and Sandy Howard rely on the chimp Cheta for comic relief. Cheta discovers the consequences of messing around with bees. Fourth, Tarzan has an educated Jane at his side and provides life lessons for a teenage Boy who runs around in a loincloth, too. Unlike Tarzan, Boy does communicate in complete sentences and knows how to read. Meantime, "Tarzan and the Trappers" bears a slight resemblance to "Tarzan's New York Adventure," except these trappers do not succeed in kidnapping Boy, though they take him hostage for a while. Scott makes a terrific Tarzan, and he is clearly the most muscular Ape man to grace the silver screen. Eva Brent looks like she walked out of a designer fashion saloon in her Jane outfit with her coiffed hair and lipstick. Were it not for Tarzan and Cheta, she wouldn't survive long in the jungle. When we first see Jane, she is curled up and sleeping without a thought about her safety when a poisonous snake slithers over her legs. Cheta awakens Jane; Jane shrieks and kicks the snake off. Cheta attacks the snake with a stick and beats it to death. This man, woman, and child, none of whom appear to be related, live in the tree houses in the jungle.Numerous sources, far too many to document, indicate that "Tarzan and the Trappers" was a pilot for a proposed television series that did not make the cut. The production values look solid enough and this cobbled together feature is unified by Tarzan's quest to thwart illegal trappers. He ruins one trapper and has the fellow sentenced to prison and that trapper's brother decides to hunt Tarzan like something out of "The Most Dangerous Game." Of course, the flaws are really obvious. Most of the time that Tarzan appears in a scene with other actors, it is clear that they are in an elaborate studio set. Tarzan spends his time belting out his signature call, probably more than any Tarzan. He swims in crocodile-infested rivers, swings on apparently real vines, and even rides a giraffe. In most of the scenes with Tarzan charging and swinging through the jungle, it does appear to be Scott performing his own stunts. Indeed, Scott would be a difficult man to double with his physique and hair. The scene where he questions two gun bears as to their native heritage by demanding that they dance is good. It is fun to see them try to make Tarzan when they get the drop on him with a high-powered, bolt-action rifle. Tarzan refuses to dance, even as they blast the earth near his toes. Eventually, the one with the gun jams it and Tarzan teaches them a lesson. Mind you, the biggest flaw in this good versus evil epic is that nobody is in trouble for long. A dastardly big game hunter shoots one animal—an elephant, but it is pretty clear that the falling elephant was probably lensed getting up. The filmmakers printed the footage backwards to make it appear as if the beast was just struck by a bullet and knocked down.Altogether, "Tarzan and the Trappers" qualifies as a serviceable Tarzan, but it cannot compare with later Tarzan sagas like "Tarzan's Greatest Adventure" and "Tarzan the Magnificent." Clocking in at a mere 70 minutes, "Tarzan and the Trappers" is a modest adventure that never looks too cheesy.

This Tarzan feature from the Gordon Scott series has just enough to make it watchable if you like the series in general. Scott definitely looks like Tarzan, and he has enough of a screen presence to be believable, but his wooden acting style takes the energy out of some of the scenes. The story has a few good moments, but at other times the characters and situations are just too unimaginative not to be noticeable.The story does have a fair amount of action, as Tarzan must first battle a greedy but rather foolish trapper, and then face the trapper's more malicious brother plus a treacherous jungle trader. Plenty of outdoor footage and scenes of African animals are worked in with the studio shots, and most of the time this helps to mask the low production values. 'Cheta', in fact, gets some of the best moments of the movie.So many Tarzan movies had been made before this one that it must have been hard to come up with new ideas. This one does at least have a worthwhile idea behind the plot, but it is otherwise rather uninspired in the way that it tells the story.