I wrote about Jane, heroine of a Daily Mirror comic strip in the newspaper from days gone by the other day. I said I would review the film so here it is. First its very British even with a sprinkling of Americans the humour tries to be straight out of the Carry on Films and Benny Hill class of funny which kind of fails but it’s still a bit of boys own stuff.
This would-be romp based around the saucy exploits of the cami-knickered heroine (Kirsten Hughes) of the Daily Mirror's wartime 'Jane' strip cartoon is not that bad however would never win an award not even a British only kind.
Jane and the Lost City is the story of a band of plucky but incompetent group of Allies in a race to find a fortune in diamonds with an equally incompetent band of Nazis. Along the way, both groups run into a series of mildly amusing adventures and situations, including title character
Jane's ability to lose her clothing at the most inopportune moments even a monkey strips her.
The haphazard journey starts badly with a plane crash, then onto one problem after another with Jane in various stages of undress they a rescued, and team up with life-saving Yank Jungle Tarzan Jack Buck (Sam J Jones). They have to keep one-step ahead of the evil Nazis Lola Pagoda (Maud Adams) and Herr Heinrich (Jasper Carrott) as everyone searches for the lost city of diamonds.
They trek through the veldt finally find the cardboard Lost City not much cash went into set construction presided over by Sheba the Leopard Queen, late of Roedean. Notwithstanding the spasmodic salacious shots of Jane's principal silk-clad joints, the film translates the innocent eroticism and tongue-in-cheek adventurism of the strip into something watchable.
The film comes to a lively confrontation aboard the Nazis' plane, as Jane and her crew come to blows with the bad guys. A representative highlight: though Jungle Jack gets beat down by the big German guy, Jane later gets mad at the German and knocks him unconscious with one adrenaline-fueled blow.
The film is essentially a farce, and a rather amusing one, with a few spoofs from other films. I never thought I'd see a version of the shower scene from Psycho involving Jasper Carrott as the baddie, but I just have. And there's a bit of a Casablanca spoof at the end. It also has more mildly racist, colonial era, African clichés and stereotypes than I could even keep track of; the first five minutes alone feature pith helmets, spear-wielding natives, a dying man whose last words are of a lost city, and a vast chasm to be crossed by swinging on a vine. Africans did not, of course, build this lost city (which is not named), heaven forbid. Still, at least the city's queen is an African, not a white woman as per She. Even if she did go to top British schools/colleges Roedean and Oxford.
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