Is Harum Scarum The Best Movie Ever? Good Grief, NO!

The Good: Camp value, Michael Ansara
The Bad: Acting, Plot, Sets, Direction, Character, Lack of decent DVD extras
The Basics: From the first Technicolor opening credit flashes through the closing song, Harum Scarum is purely awful Elvis Presley camp.


A few years back, when I went to Las Vegas for my annual Star Trek convention pilgrimage, I scheduled the trip such that we overshot Vegas and went to California. This meant I was going to be on the road a few extra days and for the first time, I did not plan out all of the stops. This meant that I played by ear on finding hotels on the way out to California (never doing that again!) and in Missouri, I discovered a wonderful, out of the way, 50's diner that was probably made better by my complete exhaustion when crashing there. On the wall of the diner was various 1950's memorabilia and collectibles and I had to laugh at one of them. There on the wall was "Elvis goes to Afghanistan!" Yes, the movie poster for Harum Scarum, advertised this and I told myself if I ever had the opportunity to see the movie, it was now on the list.

That opportunity came yesterday when I discovered my local library system had Harum Scarum on DVD and I could get it via interlibrary loan. Having now watched Harum Scarum, I think writing a review is the best possible public service I could do. Yeesh! This movie is terrible! In all of the most wonderfully campy ways, this film is just awful and it was a delight to watch it, as I had never seen an Elvis Presley movie before.

Johnny Tyronne, international movie star of action-adventure films, is in the Middle East promoting his new musical, action-adventure film when he is abducted! Taken to a nation that has been isolated for 2000 years, Johnny finds himself in the company of a thief, a gaggle of bellydancers and a mysterious woman who wants Johnny to use his talents to kill the king. Threatening the lives of the thieves and orphans against his cooperation, Johnny reluctantly sets out to kill the king of the small nation while realizing that the woman of his dreams may be the king's daughter!

Harum Scarum is - from what I've heard - a pretty typical Elvis Presley movie; Elvis plays an Elvis-like character as an excuse to break into song periodically and run around mock-fighting, kissing various women and wearing parachute pants (very flattering on the King, by the way!). Opening with the movie within the movie, one of the immediate problems with Harum Scarum is that it presents something of a spoof of itself to open the film, then basically duplicates that for the rest of the film.

The plot is so simple and canned it's amazing to think that even in 1965 when the movie was originally released, it was not considered passe. Johnny Tyronne, played by Elvis Presley, is abducted by The Assassins, to kill a king with his martial arts abilities (which are vastly overstated in the movie). He is extorted to betray his principles of "only in self defense" with the defense of women, children and lovable marketplace thieves. And, of course, there is the most obvious trick in the book to smoke out the real culprits behind the plot to kill the king.

And here's what keeps Harum Scarum from being a total waste. Writer Gerald Drayson Adams uses the best possible villain for the film. Yes, it's the oil companies! Apparently, even in the mid-'60's, Adams was concerned over the international dependence on oil and the unmasking of the villainous oil conglomerates becomes the high point of the film.

The problem is, most of the film is actually about Elvis Presley running around, doing the most fake martial arts in the world, and cozying up to many women in bellydancer outfits. None of that is truly a complaint, it just is what it is. Harum Scarum is an obvious vehicle for Elvis to continue to grow his music career using the film as a pretty blatant advertisement. He sings "Kismet," "Harem Holiday," "Go East, Young Man," a bevy of songs from a pool to his desirous lover, and a Las Vegas song at the end that served only to close the film and remind me that "Viva Las Vegas" was not included in the 30 #1 Hits album of Elvis's that I recently heard and reviewed.

And when he's singing, Elvis is fine. But yes, there's a "but . . ." after that. I am all for historical accuracy, but there's something troubling about watching a film on DVD on my HD-TV only to see the lips not matching the words. When Elvis is singing, often the lips and words do not match precisely. This is not a hardware issue on my end, I soon discovered, but rather a problem with the original print that was not fixed for the DVD release. That seems especially lazy of Warner Brothers, to me.

But when it comes to acting . . . Harum Scarum is universally bad. I get that Elvis has great eyes; they are blue and clear and one wants to call them radiant, but in this film, they are vacant. Elvis looks around and never seems to connect with anything or anyone he is seeing, so the entire film, his eyes carry a glassy, inexpressive expression that makes one wonder if he he had been replaced by a robot. Especially when he is singing, Elvis as Johnny seems disconnected from all around him and that is distracting.

The only acting coup in the film is that of the Prince, played by Michael Ansara. A genre fan like myself knows Ansara from his performance of Kang in Star Trek's "Day Of The Dove" (reviewed here!) a few years after this film, but it's refreshing to see (and hear) Ansara here. The problem with watching Harum Scarum now is that just like Elvis's presence clearly indicates a hero character, Ansara's presence indicates a very specific type of character and he lives up to that expectation, though he does it quite well.

In the end, Harum Scarum is completely mindless fun, less some of the fun for serious cinephiles. It's the type of movie where Elvis takes out a tiger using his martial arts ability which is indicated by a series of cuts that never actually put Elvis or the tiger in a shot together. It's campy and the most troubling aspect of it is that it isn't even smart camp.

Elvis plays Johnny Tyronne, a movie star. Certainly, this is not a stretch for Elvis. I can live with that. But when Tyronne is kidnaped by the Assassins, he never uses the tried and true, "Umm . . . I'm just an actor" excuse. I mean the Assassins, who by their name ought to be able to carry out a simple coup, extort and actor and the film is so desperate to maintain the illusion of movie magic that Tyronne never says, "Yup, didn't really kill that tiger, it's just a movie," which might well have saved him a lot of trouble.

And the viewer from having to suffer through this 85 minute advertisement for Harum Scarum: The Soundtrack.

On DVD, Harum Scarum is presented with minimal bonus features, in fact there are only trailers for other Elvis Presley movies. There are no commentaries, nor featurettes, making this a poor use of the medium.

For other completely hokey, contrived comedies, be sure to check out my reviews of:
Did You Hear About The Morgans?
Bride Wars
Couples Retreat

2.5/10

For other film reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

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The Guilty Pleasure Of "The Gamesters Of Triskelion" Cannot Save It From An Objective Review!

The Good: Fun, Thematic issues, Hints of character
The Bad: Terrible acting, Mediocre – and very simple – plot, Inconsistent
The Basics: When Captain Kirk, Uhura and Chekov are abducted and forced to fight in gladiator events, the viewer cringes to consider they ever likes this poorly acted and presented piece.


Every now and then, I come across an episode of Star Trek that I have a soft spot for, usually because it was one of the first episodes I saw when I started watching the show. One such episode is “The Gamesters Of Triskelion,” an episode that I watch now and cringe to think how I once enjoyed it as much as I did. Objectively, it’s a very bad episode of television and not a very good representation of Star Trek and in the context of the series, it’s even worse as it is almost thematically and structurally identical to “Bread And Circuses” (click here for my review!).

The Enterprise is exploring uncharted space when Captain Kirk, Lieutenant Uhura and Ensign Chekov disappear from the transporter before it can even dematerialize them. Abducted by an alien transporter beam of uncertain origin, Spock and Scott begin to search for the three lost officers with little sense of hope. Kirk, Uhura and Chekov find themselves on a planet in a distant star system, Triskelion, where they are held hostage by the Providers, beings that force aliens of many different races to fight one another in gladiator contests. When Kirk and his officers begin to resist their will, their lives are put in jeopardy, prompting Kirk to enter into a dangerous gambit with the Providers!

“The Gamesters Of Triskelion” is a remarkably simple episode that has pretty much a one-line pitch idea (“Captain Kirk gets abducted and has to fight in gladiator tournaments”) and has to be fleshed out with subplots in order to make it to the time allotment of the episode. As a result, Kirk has a relationship with his gladiator instructor where he seduces her to try to get information on the nature of the Providers. It’s pretty much a generic seduction by Kirk and his romance with the green-tinged porn star (Angelique Pettyjohn was in the pictures . . .) is one of the less memorable except . . .

Shahna, the thrall Kirk trains with and seduces, is characterized by childlike naiveté and an innocence that could exist only in the imagination of a science fiction/fantasy writer . . . and perhaps every fifteen year old boy! Shahna is written with a broken English, kinda slow curiosity that requires Kirk to have to teach her the ways of love that makes one think writer Margaret Armen got her start in writing porn! The simplistic Shahna makes it very hard to take the episode seriously because Kirk is playing with such a stacked deck. I mean, that the episode is not over in five minutes (the result of the collars of obedience the abductees are fitted with) is somewhat insulting considering the level of functioning Shahna is operating at. Indeed, there's something unseemly about the way Kirk couples with someone so dim . . .

Indeed, one wonders why the Providers bothered to abduct the members of the Enterprise crew; they were just asking for trouble. All of the adversaries Kirk, Chekov and Uhura face are unimpressive and working with far less upstairs than they are. Indeed, until the Providers are revealed, it seems like Kirk and his team are the only ones on the planet with any brains. The rest of the thralls are brutes, weapons masters or people with funny skin colors and accents (Chekov is paired with a yellow and pink woman with a deep voice!) and none of them are developed as characters so much as caricatures. Indeed, the peak of this ridiculousness is the giant brute whose race is defined by slightly darker skin, wearing fur and the most fake set of pointed teeth jutting out from his underbite ever seen on television!

Once the premise is established, the episode is broken up with Kirk fighting for his life, Kirk romancing Shahna, and Spock searching minute leads for the Captain. The plot is ridiculously simple and it’s something that has been seen on Star Trek before this. As well, it would be seen afterward; when Star Trek: Voyager did a crossover with wrestling in its fifth season, the plot pretty much mirrored “The Gamesters Of Triskelion,” save that there is less romance and more fighting. Yes, this type episode appeals to the same type audience.

It is worth noting that one of my very reasonable problems with “The Gamesters Of Triskelion” is that it does not live up to its own premises. So, for example, Kirk is put into a ring with two different color tiles on the floor forming a patterns. His section is central and breaks up three other areas that have the other color tile. When he is set upon by three thralls, the rules are that he cannot step onto the other color without forfeiting the match, yet even an inattentive viewer will note that when the fight gets going, no one pays attention to this mandate! Kirk moves pretty freely over the floor, even when he makes an effort not to.

But the fight sequences in this episode are some of the worst choreography the series (and the franchise) ever does. It’s hard to imagine what the director was thinking at points. That the producers didn't ask for alternative takes is alarming.

There are two things that hold up even remotely well in this episode over time and the perspective of a bit more maturity than when I initially began watching Star Trek. The first is the theme of the episode. “The Gamesters Of Triskelion” is an exhortation demanding freedom, even if one has to risk their lives for it. Kirk is obsessed with regaining his freedom and the freedom of everyone on Triskelion. He tries to reject the premise that the fighting is necessary at all and he makes wonderful points on the value of liberty.

(Even if he's already made the exact same points and played the same gambits in prior episodes!)

The other thing is the episode's lone decent performance. Joseph Ruskin plays the monolithic Galt, the Master Thrall, the liaison between the thralls, gladiators and the Providers. He does not have much to do but speak in a dramatic and redubbed voice that insinuates menace and power, but he does that quite well. He is interesting to watch and his few scenes were memorable enough that when he guest starred in the first season of Alias I eagerly looked for him.

But that is a stretch. All of the other performances are melodramatic, over-the-top and or campy. The episode suffers because it looks and feels cheap as far as the integrity of the storytelling goes. It seems like whatever isn't obvious is overdone and none of the performers shine and – once again – we learn nothing new about the characters (after all, there was nothing to suggest Chekov might like masculine women or that Uhura wanted to be raped, so when they both reject their thralls advances, it’s not a big surprise!).

“The Gamesters Of Triskelion” is candy and it’s not particularly good candy, regulating this to a pretty forgotten place on the shelf after a time. Fans of drama are likely to be freaked out by the camp quality of it and fans of science fiction shows have certainly seen something similar but better before. Even within the franchise, Star Trek does better, even for those of us for whom this was one of our earliest Trek memories!

[Knowing that VHS is essentially a dead medium, it's worth looking into Star Trek - The Complete Second Season on DVD, which is also a better economical choice than buying the VHS. Read my review of the second season by clicking here!
Thanks!]

4/10

For other Star Trek episode, DVD set and movie reviews, please visit my index page!

© 2010, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.




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