King Solomon's Mines

Haggard's magnificently cynical Allan Quartermain gives way to Richard Chamberlain's bland incompetent, a man with the sex appeal of a sheep and the comic timing of a manatee. Sharon Stone is trapped in the role of a silly woman who needs rescuing, much like the heroine of the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom farrago, a film which this clearly imitates. The friendly Umbopo turns out, for reasons a shade obscure, to be Twala, the book's bad number. And the feral relentlessness of tribal bloodshed is nowhere to be seen; instead there are comic Huns with pointy helmets and bad manners. It's stone cold dead on the slab. CPea.