Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #163/My World of Flops Perving Out in the Jungle Case File #171 Sheena: Queen of the Jungle (1984)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

Speaking of famous, world-class beauties with strange lives, there is a good chance that Tanya Roberts will be remembered as much for the curious manner in which she died as for the things she did in her life. 

Or rather it’s likely Roberts will be remembered in no small part for the way in which her death was reported. The Charlie’s Angels alum made headlines when she died at 65 recently. She also made headlines when it was reported that she was not, in fact, actually dead but she also was not doing well, that she was hovering between life and death, and tilting very heavily towards the death side of the equation. 

A sad, then confused public began the process of mourning Roberts, then hit the brakes on the grieving process, then continued apace once it was reported that Roberts was DEFINITELY dead, that they checked and everything to make sure they were right. 

It was a decidedly peculiar end to a remarkable life for the sex symbol, who parlayed a role as a cast-member on Charlie’s Angels in its final years and appearances in cult movies like Fingers and The Beastmaster into a starring role in the big-budget 1984 comic book adaptation Sheena, a stint as a Bond girl in Roger Moore’s final outing as 007, 1985’s A View To a Kill and finally a long run in the supporting cast of That 70s Show. 

Sheena: Queen of the Jungle was part of a wave of racist colonialist fantasies about beautiful white adventurers venturing into the dark continent and tussling with evil dark skinned foreigners in the pursuit of valuable artifacts or mystical McGuffins that flourished briefly in the aftermath of the blockbuster success of Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

Many of these opportunistic adventure movies were based on pre-existing intellectual property from decades before the Indiana Jones movies, lurid adaptations like the T&A heavy softcore 1981 Bo Derek vehicle Tarzan, the Apeman, 1984’s The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak starring our old friend and Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 All-Star Tawny Kitaen and two deeply unwanted Allan Quatermain movies, 1985’s King Solomon’s Minds and 1986’s Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.  

The problems with these movies, beyond sucking, is that they inherited the racial attitudes of their 1930s/1940s era source material, which was racist as fuck. They also reflect the racial attitudes of the time when they were made and released, which, unfortunately, also happened to be racist as fuck. 

Shaman (left) and Sheena

As imperialist white savior fantasies go, Sheena is unusual pure, unusually ridiculous and unusually insidious. In King Kong and The Towering Inferno director John Guillermin’s adaptation of the first comic book to feature a female lead exclusively white people, don’t have power over black people because of racism, slavery, genocide, colonialism or any of that jazz. 

White people have power over black people here because that is what the prophecy foretold. As a wise African shaman from the mysterious Zambouli tribe informs the little girl version of our heroine immediately after her doctor parents died in a cave-in, “a golden god-child shall come from the depths to be the protector of the Zambouli tribe and all its creatures.” 

Sheena portrays white supremacy as divinely ordained, a matter of divine right, something that tribespeople not only instantly embrace but have been waiting for all their lives. 

The wise and noble Shaman in particular seems to have lived for the moment when a little American blonde girl would wander into their village to assume her rightful place as their ruler, defender and God.

Sheena is pretty damned racist. There’s no real way to make a movie about a California blonde supermodel type ruling over an African tribe as their divinely anointed defender without being problematic. 

But Sheena is not as racist as it could be. The tribespeople that Sheena defends are unmistakably stereotypes but they’re relatively positive caricatures, noble warriors at peace with the land and all of its creatures. 

Sheena similarly depicts contemporary Africa as modern and sophisticated, albeit with a lot of evil opportunists for Sheena, her heart of gold, her head full of pudding and her caveman/Frankenstein’s monster vocabulary to defeat. 

The Zambouli tribe are not unlike the inhabitants of Wakanda, an advanced society with incredible healing powers and the ability to communicate telepathically with animals. Alas, if the plot of Black Panther involved a little girl who would grow up to be Scarlett Johansson being recognized as the savior and defender of Wakanda it would instantly go from empowering to problematic. 

We then leap forward in time to the present. The little girl is now Tanya Roberts, a preternaturally powerful warrior queen who has attained God-like powers but lost what she knew about her old life and the mysterious ways of Westerners in the process. 

With Sheena, Tanya Roberts graduated from the jiggle TV of Charlie’s Angels to the Jiggle Cinema of Sheena, changing mediums while maintaining an unrelentingly focus on soft-core titillation.

a still from a PG movie for kids

Roberts really puts the T&A in “Tarzan knockoff” here. The movie doesn’t just have a shocking, almost unbelievable amount of nudity for a PG-rated kid’s film; it has a lot of nudity for a movie, period. 

The late actress spends much of Sheena’s first act completely naked, lovingly washing her perfect body in a waterfall in what I can assure you is a very narratively important scene. 

Sheena seems to be of the mindset that audiences could either ogle its heroine or root for her and figured that getting audiences to leer shamelessly at the fetching jungle heroine was the easier and more commercial and consequently the preferable option.

With her low-cut, midriff-bearing, scandalously skimpy jungle bikini, Sheena is relentlessly sexualized but she’s also disconcertingly child-like in sometimes disconcerting ways. 

There are a LOT of shots like this

Sheena makes it seem like its protagonist didn’t have a romantic or sexual thought until she meets white reporter Vic Casey (Ted Wass). It is only that point that she realizes that she is, in fact, a ferociously sexual creature. 

In embarrassingly representative dialogue, Sheena responds to Vic kissing her by inquiring, “Mouths were given us to eat with. Why did you touch yours to mine?” 

In moments like that Sheena seems less adorably unworldly and naive due to the unique nature of her upbringing than a bit of an idiot. Despite spending at least part of her childhood with Western doctors, Sheena now knows nothing of the white man and his mysterious ways. 

Sheena calls clothes “skins”, helicopters “firebirds”, cars “wagons” and gasoline “water for wagons” and generally talks AND behaves like a sexy colonialist version of Phil Hartman’s classic character Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.

I listened recently to the Wonder Woman 1984 We Hate Movies episode with guest Angelica Jade Bastién where their primary criticism of the movie is that it took a heroine with incredible, preternatural powers, a literal God and made her a lovestruck sap willing to move heaven and earth in order to get a handsome white guy’s penis inside her. 

A similar dynamic is at play in Sheena. Sheena is a supernatural force for good who can control the animal kingdom telepathically yet once she begins touching her face to Vic Casey’s that seemingly becomes all she can think about. Yes, she has to protect her people from an evil king and his minions but mostly it’s all about make-out sessions with the actor who played Blossom’s dad. 

As in the comic book that inspired the film, Sheena can communicate telepathically with animals and get them to do her bidding. Here’s the thing, though: you can’t really get large groups of animals to act. 

A herd of gazelles is not thinking about hitting its mark. It’s not worried about motivation or backstory. No, a herd of gazelles is going to act like a herd of gazelles so it falls upon the audience to connect the dots between Sheena touching her forehead with a look of intense concentration and a flamboyance of flamingos (that’s right: a group of flamingoes are called a flamboyance. How cool is that?) attacking a helicopter from which Sheena is to be thrown to her death. 

Sheena separates Roberts from the tribe she was put on earth to defend so that she can bond with Vic Casey in a series of photogenic settings. White-bread romance is one of the lazier and less interesting directions to take this material.

At the same time, I appreciated how it minimizes the amount of time Roberts spends onscreen commanding large groups of African tribesmen as their glorious, universally beloved blonde, blue-eyed and smoking hot defender. The optics on that, as the kids say, are not good. Not good at all! 

Though handsomely mounted and beautifully shot, Sheena isn’t much of a movie but the thirteen year old me saw it as nothing less than a gift from the Gods of Perversion: a movie with the same family-friendly rating as E.T and nearly as much top-quality movie star nudity as the erotic thrillers Roberts would make later in her career. 

As a vehicle for Roberts the actress this deserves every last Golden Raspberry nomination it received, five. As a vehicle for her astonishing beauty and ripe sexuality, on the other hand, it is much more satisfying and successful. 

Sheena was a bomb at the box-office but predictably developed a cult following on home video and cable, where audiences could masturbate furiously during its never-ending parade of T&A without risking legal consequences. 

I’m not too proud to concede that Sheena re-connected me with the horny kid I used to be who loved movies largely because they had boobs in them. I’ve evolved a little since then but I can still very much appreciate what Roberts had to offer audiences in her radiant prime, only some of which had to do with acting. 

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco 

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