| Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold | |
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 Film poster |
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| Directed by | Gary Nelson |
| Produced by | Yoram Globus Menahem Golan |
| Written by | H. Rider Haggard (novel) Gene Quintano Lee Reynolds |
| Starring | Richard Chamberlain Sharon Stone James Earl Jones Henry Silva |
| Music by | Michael Linn |
| Cinematography | Frederick Elmes Alex Phillips |
| Editing by | Gary Griffen Alain Jakubowicz Dan Loewenthal |
| Distributed by | Cannon Film Distributors |
| Release date(s) | 16 May 1987 |
| Running time | 99 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Gross revenue | $3,751,699 (USA) (sub-total) |
| IMDb profile | |
Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold is a movie directed by Gary Nelson and released on May 16, 1987 in the USA. It is based on the novel by H. Rider Haggard of the same name. It is the sequel to King Solomon's Mines. The role of Allan Quatermain is played by Richard Chamberlain and that of Jesse Huston by Sharon Stone, who was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Awards for "Worst Actress" for this role. The movie also starred James Earl Jones as Umslopogaas, Henry Silva as Agon, Aileen Marson as Queen Nyleptha and Cassandra Peterson as Sorias. The movie was filmed simultaneously with its prequel, "King Solomon's Mines", although it was released a couple of years later. Despite the tremendous liberties both movies take with the source material, "Allan Quatermain" was loosely based, mostly, in the book sequel of Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines", titled "Allan Quatermain". In that book, that depicts Quatermain's last adventure although it's just the second in the series of novels, the character and his associates go searching for a lost white tribe in Africa, and end up involved in a war between the rival queens of the kingdom. To cut costs, the movie score was just a reuse of the material composed by Jerry Goldsmith for the first movie, and just half an hour of original material written by Michael Linn. This makes most of the music absolutely inappropiate for the scenes they are supposedly scoring. Also, Linn is no Goldsmith, and the difference in quality between the rehashed material and the new one is painfully obvious. While the first movie could be seen more as a "Indiana Jones spoof" than a rip-off, Allan Quatermain is strongly footed in the second category. For one, unlike the first movie, where some measures where taken to set Quatermain at least a little bit from Indiana Jones, like making him use dinamite and a double-barreled shotgun as his signature weapons, Quatermain no longer uses the shotgun in the movie, and he barely uses the dinamite. In fact, his weapon here is a revolver, its make and model suspiciously similar to Indiana Jones' Webley handgun. Also, in the original poster is clearly visible that Quatermain is carrying a whip around his left shoulder, just like Dr. Jones. The whip, however, was strangely absent from the theatrical cut of the movie. No scene showed Quatermain using such a weapon, making even more strange to have its presence being indicated so prominently in the poster. The answer was in the cut scenes, many of them visible in the movie's trailer. There, it's possible to see at least three scenes with Quatermain using a whip as a weapon, including a fairly elaborate fight in a rudimentary tram system -the system is visible in the scene where Agon is creating his statues, and it's included in the film poster, just beside Sharon Stone-. We can only guess why those undoubtedly expensive scenes were cut from the movie -the whole tram setup is not used for anything in the flick-, but it wouldn't be surprising to learn that George Lucas or Paramount finally threatened with a lawsuit if the filmmakers didn't put some distance between this "spoof" and their own Indiana Jones property.
