IMDb user comments for
King Solomon's Mines (1985)

advertisement

Filter:

Best Chronological Prolific Authors Loved It Hated It Hide Spoilers:

Page 1 of 6:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Index

56 comments in total

---

23 out of 27 people found the following comment useful :-
Rip-off or classic?, 10 March 2005

Author: iammedotcom from Canada

Well I read a lot of the reviews here and it seems to be pretty divided as to whether or not this is a good movie. So here's my 2 cents. In my opinion this was not trying to be Indiana Jones. I think the intension was to make a campy, cheesy spoof, and as that it succeeds fantastically. Keep in mind this was the early - mid 80's. Cheezeball B-movies were all the rage and popular. Look was came out in around that period. King Solomon's Mines, a year later a sequel, Lost City of Gold. But we had many other great cheese movies like Ice Pirates, Dungeonmaster, Dragonslayer, Spaceballs, just to name a few. Conan the Barbarian spawn a whole subgenre of barbarian movies as did Road Warrior for post-apocalyptic movies. I'm sure there where other movies of these subjects before, but these were the ones that really kicked it off for those subgenres. I think that many of those who are complaining that King Solomon's Mines is so bad are those who are too young to remember and appreciate these movies that came out in around that period or those who decided it's not "cool" to like cheesy movies.

Of course you can't compare the effects to that of Raiders of the lost Ark. Raiders had a near unlimited budget for the day, how do you compete with something like that? And do you honestly think that they blatantly ripped off scenes without getting permission first? I wouldn't be surprised if Lucas is making a small royalty of these movies, or at least did back when it came out. Yes, they rode the Raiders wave. Why is it that we criticize someone for riding a winning wave? If I had the chance, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I would argue that any of these movies have more heart than most of what comes out of Hollywood these days. These were made back when, for the most part, budgets were tight and people made movies for the love of making movies.

Having a weakness for violent gore movies and foreign, B-Movies and foreign probably comprise 60% of my DVD collection and 70-80% of my VHS collection. Almost 600 movies combined. But I have a rare gift to be able to sit down and watch a movie without comparison to another and judge it on it's own. That's why my collection contains everything from Little Mermaid and Aladdin to Cannibal Holocaust(Uncut) and Salo: 120 Days of Sodom(Uncut), from The English Patient to, yes, King Solomon's Mines. (I do, however, have Lost City of Gold on VHS) So sit back, try to watch movies without any preconception of what you are about to watch. Critics, friends, rumors are just that. You are your own person, make up your own mind. If you can't do this, you are probably looking at the wrong movie. All you will see is a bad Raiders rip-off and you should stick to what you know or "reality" *Ya Right* TV.

And that's my 2 cents.

ME

---

18 out of 20 people found the following comment useful :-
Almost Great, 2 May 2002

Author: ADOZER200 from az

This is a movie rated so low by others but by some it gives them a reminder of indiana jones. Next to those movies this one is the next best. I would recommend it to indiana jones fans who have been waiting years for another sequel. This movie has a sequel too which is almost as good but get a bit slower at the end. The movie is really good though. I enjoyed the storyline, the actors, the music by Jerry Goldsmith is very enchanting, the only thing i could say isnt that good in this film are the special effects but for the time being it will do. Theres nothing to lose so go out and rent it!

---

20 out of 24 people found the following comment useful :-
Low Budget Film At Its Finest, 3 February 2004

Author: Doramius from Las Vegas, NV

If you are rating this low because it doesn't seem realistic or it doesn't compare to Indiana Jones, quit rating these films without watching them.

Again, I find people rating films which they didn't even take the time to watch or try to understand. This is a low budget film and is closer related to fantasy/comedy than to realistic action. This is a B-Movie and directors of this style of film love to pour on the "CHEESE". The cast was great and they actually boosted the movement of the film for the sheer awe of seeing Stone and Chamberlain do some pretty dry humor. You can't even compare Indiana Jones to this as Lucas films are set to make the fantasy world come as close to reality as possible. This movie was completely the opposite. Great creativity. If you're looking for wires and obvious painted backdrops, again, you're not watching the movie. Laugh at those the second time you see the film.

Chamberlain's character is asked to help a young attractive woman to help find her father, who was lost in an exploration looking for King Solomon's mines. Someone else is looking for the mines as well and will do anything to get there and keep others from getting the hidden treasures first.

Find this and set up for a great party night. Definitely worth keeping for classic fun and enjoyment.

---

16 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
great entertainment, 2 August 2006

Author: rustyrails38 from United States

This is a fun flick, based on the original story by Rider Haggard but with lots of bits from other sources, along with some totally humorous and almost unbelievable "stuff". If you want a serious flick and are the type who takes notes during the show, go somewhere else. If you want some genuine old-fashioned, borderline ridiculous entertainment along with your big bowl of popcorn, this is definitely it. Sharron Stone's character is a trip. The bit with her taking over the position of pilot in a commandeered biplane, even though she has never even been in a plane let alone flown one, is absolutely a scream. "Vroom!" was her exact summation of the experience. As for the Germanic presence in the dark Continent, as insinuated in this version of "Solomon's Mines", this is historically correct for the time, though far from accurate in its presentation; but this is entertainment! This edition of "Solomon's Mines" is not intended to be an accurate re-run of earlier flicks. If you gotta have precision and accuracy, see the '40's version with Stu Grainger and Liz Kerr. If you want some good entertainment of the non-serious vein, this is a good one. I've worn out my VHS version and am beating the bush for a DVD replacement.

---

13 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
"Okay shoot me! I love this movie (as I loved the Indy movies).", 4 February 2007

Author: vip_ebriega from Philippines

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

*It may contain some spoilers*

I've heard many bad reviews on this film. They all say "Indiana Jones rip-off" or "Worst movie ever". But to me, this is actually very entertaining, and it's big fun indeed. The film is usually called a rip-off because they see some elements they also saw in the Indy flicks. But I didn't think that this flick riped it off. For me, I think it was parodying it. Richard Chamberlain is not that heroic as Indy, but he throws in a lot of jokes to make viewers crack a smile. Sharon Stone shouts, complains, whiles in the entire journey, but what would you expect on a big-screen debut. Herbert Lom, as I see it, is being more of funny than sinister intentionally. Same goes for John Rhys-Davies, but he looks more villainous. But it wasn't all parody and humor. "King Solomon's Mines is also action-packed. It makes you feel like you're venturing in Africa and come across cannibals and dangerous tribes people. The kids loved it, why not the adults.

Overall, this is a very enjoyable adventure flick. I would recommend to every adventure film fan and for those (like me)who are big fans of Indy.

Rating: *** out of 5.

---

15 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
KSM: A Brilliant Comedy, 8 February 2007

Author: simons1138 from Canada

A long time ago, I was introduced as an "outsider" to a group of boys who would get together once a month to have a "Cheese Fest" of real bad movies. We watched three movies, and laughed until we cried. When it was over, I shyly suggested a movie called "King Solomon's Mines". They had never heard of the film, or hadn't seen it yet. This was my opening to be "cool" with the gang.

At the next gathering, I came over with a VHS copy I rented from a store. We watched it, and had to stop the movie several times because we were laughing so hard! We all agreed that this was the best worst movie we had ever seen! About two days later, my front door bell rang, and it was the boys there to give me a gift! I had been "accepted" into their gang! Many nights of "Cheese Fests" followed, but none were as successful as the night we watched "King Solomon's Mines"! The gift, by the way, was the very VHS copy of "KSM" (which we pronounce; "Chaos, Mmm") I had rented! I still have it to this day, and have shown it to many friends who thank me every time while wiping away a tear.

---

13 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
Not too bad, 4 June 2002
Author: jimmycool20012000 (jimmycool20012000@hotmail.com) from Dalbeattie scotland

Ok i shall start by saying i am a huge Indiana Jones fan and when i saw this recently i thought it was a ghastly copy, but i think as the film progresses it gets better and some of the scenes late in the movie are very impressive - particurly when john rhys-davies forces the german guy to eat the diamonds. I liked most of the scenes with john ryhs-davies in but i was slightly disappointed to see him in rip-off of Indiana Jones as he was in Raiders of the Lost Ark. So overall this film isn't that bad to watch, its quite fun really but it is nothing compared to the mighty Indiana Jones.

---

14 out of 17 people found the following comment useful :-
Good effort at replicating Raiders !, 6 May 2005

Author: Umar Mansoor Bajwa (umar_mansoor@yahoo.com) from Lahore, Pakistan

This movie is not as bad as "Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold". It has some content of sheer excitement and adventure in it. But for most people who had already watched "Raiders of the Lost Ark" have definitely harbored discriminatory feelings and complements for this action film.

As far as action, adventure and fantasy is concerned, it was a good raw effort by J. Lee Thompson who had earlier two great feathers to his cap namely, "The Guns of Navarone" and "MecKenna's Gold". However, the next sequel of this series i.e., "The Lost City of Gold" is indeed a hopeless effort to bewitch the audience who are used to viewing better films.

Nevertheless, KSM is an interesting and reasonably well directed piece of motion picture.

---

11 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
The king of all Indiana Jones rip-off !, 17 March 2004
Author: Steve Raspberry from Laval,Quebec

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I got this movie a while ago from a video store that was having a sales on old vhs movies. I watched it with a friend that weekend and we loved it. Everything in this movie is so weird and off the wall that it turns a low budget Indiana Jones rip-off into a great adventure movie. Richard Chamberlain does a good job as Allan Quatermain being heroic and saving the damsel in distress played by a young (and very pretty) Sharon Stone. The bad guys are played by two fun actors (Herbert Lom as a german general and John Rhys-Davies as an evil turkish man) who are in over-acting mode.

The story is totally different from the book the movie is based on. They changed it to a more Indiana Jones-esque story in which Allan Quatermain great hunter/adventurer must help a girl find her father and stop the "eeeevil" german soldiers from getting to the King Solomon's Mines. What makes it so great is all those scenes that make you go "Did i just really see that ?".

****SPOILERS AHEAD ! WARNING !****

Quatermain trying to rescue the girl's dad on a train, barges into a wagon full of german soldiers then realizes his mistake. What do they do ? Do they shoot him ? Do they arrest him ? No ! Quatermain ask one of the guy for his trumpet, start playing some music while walking across the wagon and for some unknown reason everybody starts singing along happily until he leaves.

The dialogue is also one of the fun aspect of this film. There's a scene in which a man gets crushed to death by a spike trap against a door in a shop and all the shop owner says is "My door !!" while looking sad. FUNNY STUFF ! Also when the german general says that german makes the best laxative after eating diamonds. All those lines are gems !

****End Spoilers****

If you're looking for a fun cheesy adventure movie that doesn't take itself seriously, then i recommend this movie else you should skip it.

8/10

---

14 out of 20 people found the following comment useful :-
9 out of 10 hoots on my Hoot-o-Meter, 27 April 2006

Author: (catu11us@pacbell.net) from United States

This is another love-or-hate film, with opinion fairly strongly tilted toward "hate". Media critics certainly did. As I'm fond of reminding people who read my reviews, what do media critics know? They hate almost anything that doesn't look like what's in some museum old movies hang in.

This particular film has plenty to hate. It's an obvious imitation "Raiders of the Lost Ark". It hasn't got a lot in common with the H. Rider Haggard book, much less the classic older film. It features Richard Chamberlain (some weird people find this a drawback). It's played for laughs. A lot.

These are actually positive factors, of course.

Allan Quatermain is the spiritual ancestor of Bernard Quatermass – if you know who that is. It doesn't help when people mispronounce the first 2 syllables of either name as if spelt "quaRter". There's evidence that the first syllable should be pronounced as //quā// (that is, //kway//), which is how the British pronounce it in the Quātermass films.

The film's plot, inasmuch as it barely resembles the original work, is irrelevant. It's merely a backdrop for snappy dialogue and funny business. This version of "Mines" is in fact a parody … not only a parody of the main title, but a parody of "Raiders of the Lost Ark". If the similarity of scenes in Cairo in the latter and the jungle-border city (whose name I forget) isn't a dead giveaway, the presence of John Rhys-Davies in both films, playing roughly similar rôles, should be (in the former he's a bad guy, in the latter a good guy).

I have no quarrel with parodying both "Mines" and "Ark" – which have enough similarity of plot to allow that – and one can certainly enjoy the film on its own. The problem is targeting the wrong flick at the wrong time – that is, parodying a recent film ("Ark") by parodying either an old film or an even older book. Alas, the object of the parody needs to be familiar to the audience, and actually few in this film's audience would have seen the old film (1937), much less read Haggard's book. (If anyone is thinking that I forgot the TV version, please note that it was a year later than the 1985 film.) This would have been a far better film at its root, as a parody of "Ark", had it been wholly unrelated to Quatermain and had a different title.

Speculation aside, this is a lighthearted and fairly funny film when taken on its own. It certainly has a good cast – and a good thing that is, too. Characters and dialogue are painted with very broad strokes, and in the hands of lesser performers would seem overly clownish. As it is, the line is perilously close to being crossed – and I daresay some will suggest it's actually crossed quite a bit. The title rôle is taken by the enormously talented Richard Chamberlain once (as Dr. Kildare) the heart-throb of thousands of hyper-hormonal young females in the '60s. Here the bloom of youth is gone, but the charm (not to mention the talent) is still there. As a parody, this is pretty much a farce – it doesn't entirely succeed in that venue, but to the extent it does succeed, it owes that to Chamberlain as well as other excellent talent.

Chamberlain's employer and later love interest, Jesse (sic)* Huston, is played by the delightful Sharon Stone. She and Chamberlain have a chemistry that helps things rollick along. Set in the 1890s, "Mines" has the Imperial German Army and German imperial ambitions replacing the only slightly more distasteful Nazis and Nazi ambitions in "Ark". These forces are personified by the cartoon cardboard of Col. Bockner, played by the wonderful Herbert Lom. His is the greatest comic talent here, and he succeeds almost beyond hope in making Bockner satirically funny instead of farcically stupid. John Rhys-Davies plays Dogati, the petty governor-dictator of the small African town of ***** (I forget; consider it a Senior Moment). This part is a marvelous parody of his rôle in "Ark". He plays it up well, always taking (insofar as possible) the comedic high rode. Rhys-Davies is one of those greatly talented Welsh actors who show up with greater frequency than the tiny population of Wales would account for. Finally there's the excellent South African actor, Ken Gampu. He plays Haggard's native character Umbopa (here misspelt Umbopo). This is, inexplicably, not a comic role – and Gampu carries it of with impressive dignity and physical presence.

((*Nowadays most people are clueless as to names -- for instance, those who spell the female name "Marian" (Latin Maria) as if it were the male name "Marion" (Latin Marius). Similarly, "Jesse" is a male name, as in King David's father. The female version is "Jessie". Of course, naming your daughter Jesse or Marion (shudder) is a damn sight better than saddling her with "Moonbeam Teapot Beach-Pismo" or "Wingnut Pramalot Black-Smith-Wesson" or whatever people are naming their kids nowadays.)) Another major talent, whose name puzzlingly doesn't appear in the credits, is the very talented Bernard Archard. Archard, who has had a long and distinguished career, has done very little in film or TV since 1987 and nothing since 1992. Here he plays a fair-sized minor role – Sharon Stone's father Professor Huston.

Side note: this film and Haggard's book make the common error of locating King Solomon's mines in Africa. Hogwash. Solomon's authority never extended even into Arabia, much less into the Dark Continent.

Ultimately, my advice in watching this film is: don't get up-tight about how it's not really very much like Haggard's original creation, how it's terminally silly, how … well, you get the idea. It's actually a lot of fun, and rather good fun at that, thanks to the high caliber of its performers.

---

---

Page 1 of 6:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Add another comment

---

Related Links

Plot summary	Ratings	Awards
Newsgroup reviews	External reviews	Plot keywords
Main details	Your user comments	Your vote history