With the success of Tarzan, a rival pulp magazine created “Sheena.” Also raised in the jungle, though the white woman was no relation to Tarzan. This movie, coming out the same year as “Supergirl,” was somewhat better. Tanya Roberts plays the blond jungle queen, fighting corrupt African colonial officials and mercenaries. Maltin calls this one a bomb, “Mother Nature forgot to endow her with a script. Supposed to be campy, but it’s just plain awful.” The movie plods along with little action, and the one fairly exciting scene has a slow music soundtrack that seems to have been dubbed in from some other movie. Additional cast: Ted Wass, Donovan Scott, Elizabeth of Toro, directed by John Guillermin 117 minutes, rated PG, seen recently on American Movie Classics Now here’s Joe Bob Briggs, who likes it a lot more than Supergirl: Tanya Roberts, whose sub-atomic breasts resulted in the only topless picture to get a PG rating, stars as the zebra-riding Valley Girl in Zambooli Land. It seems that Sheena's parents were turned into Mrs. Paul's fish sticks by getting stuck inside a volcano, but Sheena managed to run the heck out of that stewpot and end up living with some National Geographic-type Negroes with bones in their noses and those saggy potato-bag knockers only found in places where medical care consits of sticking people in the ground up to their necks and then running around kicking dirt in their teeth until they're well. Sheena takes a bath. (Better than the bath she took in BEASTMASTER and about the same as the bath Bo Derek took as Jane in "Tarzan the Ape Man.") While Sheena's taking the bath, a reporter flies over in his airplane and decides he'd like to sign up for African water polo. Then this old woman who's Sheena's stepmother heads off to the city to tell the king he's about to get killed by the evil prince who used to play for the NFL, but before she gets there this moon-face American drinks poison and drowns in his oatmeal. Then Sheena rides the zebra. Then the king makes a toast to the Super Bowl and while he's talking a Zambooli shoots him with a poison arrow and he falls in the potato salad, and they arrest Sheena's slack mama for the crime. Sheena sends some brainwaves to an elephant, and the elephant crashes through some trees and breaks down a fence and gets Sheena's mama out of jail. Then they use some more elephant ESP to get away, and the general of the army says "None of this women's lip stuff around here," and he sends the marines after em through the jungle. There's a lot of exploding bamboo, like in Nam movies, and then all the animals come running out to save Sheena. The most touching scene in the movie comes when Sheena's mom cashes her chips, checks in at the Breakdance Hotel, lays down on the ground, and starts dying while the elephant digs her grave with his trunk. Once the ugly old broad is out of the way, we get some Monkey Fu, some Rhino Fu, some Snake Fu, and some monkey bidness between Sheena and the reporter in a treehouse. Then Sheena takes a bath again. Then she tries to talk. "Remove those strange skins you wear." (The reporter put on a Haggar suit to go into the forest.) And "Fur! You have fur! This cannot be." (Uh . . . chest hair?) And "Mouths were give us to eat with. Why did you touch yours to mine?" Then the army starts blowing up everything, and the reporter gets scared shirtless he won't live long enough to get an Emmy. The leader of the army keeps saying stuff like "Eez good psychology," but he never can catch Sheena, even when she's feeding fermented buffalo milk to Mr. Macho and shooting flaming arrows at gasoline trucks and dodging machine gun bullets. Then Sheena gets a little p.o.ed and concentrates real hard and puts her fist on her head and starts talking to the animals and the zebras and antelopes start running to make the machine-gun helicopter go in the other direction, but the copter guy just kills all the animals and then comes back and captures Sheena and her wimp and when they're taking them to jail the nerd says "I'd love to show you a view of the World Trade Towers from my loft," and Sheena looks at him like he's got vee-dee. Finally, the evil prince football player's girlfriend decides she'll take Sheena up in the copter and drop her buns over the holy waterfall, but once they get up in the air Sheena talks to the animals again and this time we got results: killer flamingo attack. The flamingos PECK THE COPTER TO DEATH. (I know you don't believe me.) Now the army is really p.o.ed and so in the big final scene we got machine guns, flame-throwers, tanks, copters, trucks, and soldiers on one side. On the other side we got zoo animals. Clue: it's feeding time. Twenty breasts. Half gallon blood. Fourteen beasts. Twenty-five dead bodies. Exploding bamboo. Kung Fu. Bimbo Fu. Zoo Fu. National Geographic tribal dancing. One heart attack. Two arrows through the heart. One fistfight. Three motor vehicle chases, with three crash-and-burns. One stampede. One zebra massacre. Two spears through the body. One cure for cancer. Best line: "How much I love you, Sheena, so much it busts my heart."

© 2000 Joe Bob Briggs. All Rights Reserved. Not an AOL Time-Warner Company in this lifetime.
"Sheena" is available on DVD

For this and other movie reviews by the artist formerly known as the host of MonsterVision, go to Joe Bob Briggs.com

Supergirl (1984)

(From Joe Bob's Ultimate B Movie Guide)

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With the success of Wonder Woman, rival comic book company DC decided to create a female version of their Superman. She would be a cousin, introduced as a previously unknown fellow escapee from planet Krypton’s destruction. But by the 1960s, the writers had no clue what to do. Boys just weren’t interested in Supergirl and most girls didn’t care about any superhero, so Supergirl plots often revolved around getting a date or trying to impress a boyfriend. Then came this movie a couple of decades later. At least it couldn’t get any worse. Helen Slater stars, opposed by female villain Faye Dunaway (who was much better in “Mommy Dearest” and in the movie version of “Evita”). Leonard Maltin says it’s “long, dull, heavy-handed. Slater is cute but bland in title role.” Additional cast: Peter O’Toole, Peter Cook, Brenda Vaccaro, Mia Farrow of Rosemary’s Baby and Matt Frewer of “Max Headroom” fame. 114 minutes, rated PG. Seen recently on superstation WGN. Now here’s Professor Joe Bob Briggs with his two cent’s worth on the movie that made about that much at the box office: “Helen Slater puts about 17 curves into that "S" on her chest and displays more blonde hair than Lassie, but never springs those super-puppies out of the chute in this comic-book epic from the "didn't quite work out" file. Helen lives under the ocean in Jacques Cousteau Land with a bunch of bad actors, but Peter O'Toole teaches her some interesting things to do with an electric orange popsicle and gives her a little black egg that lights up like a necklace buried in Liz Taylor's neck. Only she loses the black egg and it goes flying through space and lands in Faye Dunaway's potato salad. Superbimbo's mission is to go find Faye Dunaway, get the egg, and sober up Peter O'Toole so he can go pick up his check for a million and give his eyebrows a rest. When a couple of truck drivers try to go for the supergroceries, she has to use a little kung fu, then she goes to prep school, takes a shower, puts on a bra over her clothes, does some X-ray vision stuff, saves a gardener from a man-eating steam shovel, kills a monster with a piece of lightning, fights some poltergeist weenies, survives the Attack of the Bumper Cars, and gets zapped into a mirror and bazookaed into space. But the last straw comes when Faye Dunaway, who can make her eyes look like Ginsu knives, takes Superbimbo's boyfriend and chains him to a zebra-skin bed. Now she's just a LITTLE p.o.ed. We're talking fireballs, we're talking demon storms, and we're talking Peter O'Toole without any makeup on. We're talking feeding Faye Dunaway to a Godzilla-demon with bad table manners. No breasts. Two dead bodies. Three beasts. Bimbo Fu. Excellent Peter O'Toole imitation by Peter O'Toole.”

© 2000 Joe Bob Briggs. All Rights Reserved.
"Supergirl" is available on video and on DVD
Helen Slater can currently be seen in the cast of the Poltergeist tv-series on the Sci-Fi Channel

Sheena TV episode (edited down to 5 minutes)

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