The Jewel Of The Nile

I seem to recall I said in an earlier review for another lousy movie that I believe bad movies have a right to exist. If they aren't blatantly offensive, I don't begrudge artistic failings TOO much. Couple of notes about that that are relevant here.

1. There is NO need for this movie with this pedigree, to be THIS bad. I understand and even respect bad films made by bad filmmakers. This is trash by people who should know better.

2. It's actually pretty offensive after all. The portrayals of the Nubians are outright racist and the characters of Omar and the Jewel are white actors in blackface passing for Egyptians. It's just gross on every level.

Danny DeVito was a rare highlight in the sense that I liked him in this movie when I didn't the first. The only interesting thing the movie did for me was give Ralph a measure of redemption by the end.

And I knew I would be giving the film a negative review from the very first scene. There is no getting around how awful that fantasy sequence is. It's so bad it makes me think very little of Joan Wilder's imagination and writing abilities. The Western scene at the beginning of Romancing The Stone wasn't amazing or anything. But it was a credible thing that perhaps a popular novelist would have written. This is just dreck. And I can't help but notice Joan's lack of imagination is so bad that the pirate ship she envisions is clearly on a soundstage. What a train-wreck of a sequence, and the thing that told me right off the bat the movie was gonna megasuck.

Let's be real. Romancing The Stone isn't great either, and is vastly overpraised. So you might get an inkling of how bad this is just by me saying it's REALLY inferior to it. And the thing that pisses me off is it never needed to be. I hate movies from the 1980's.

Do you know what's amazing? UHF is equally as crappy as this movie, but it gets nothing by guff for it, despite being funnier and more enjoyable to watch, while this movie gets a "It was the 80's, what you expect?" era-free pass. I don't see why a movie this bad was ever taken seriously.

Sigh. Not happy. Bad franchise. Bad. *.