This is a true slab of Hollywood cheese, in epic proportions. Highly enjoyable, as long as you know what you’re getting yourself into. Hackneyed, clichéd, surprisingly aimless with little sense of real dramatic build-up – all of which adds up to a fairly enjoyable ball of corn.

First, the characters: cartoonish, clichéd send-ups of the usual adventure story tropes. The rugged, George Hamilton-orange, disillusioned Quatermain, who of course still has a heart of gold. The naïve, proud, fair damsel-in-a-foreign-land, Mrs. Curtis (think A Passage to India’s Anna Quested, with none of the moral confusion). The simple, often silly, but still good hearted native assistant. The Captain Kurtz crazy-man encountered deep within the Heart of Darkness.

Second, the story. A typical Western trek into Darkest Africa, where the worst white fears are realized. Stampeding animals (though one scene from Jurassic Park seems to have been a straight copy of the one found here). Dark-skinned, naturally war-like, cannibalistic natives out for white-man blood. A fair-skinned heroine who somehow manages to stay constantly made-up and well-lit, and a leading man whose charm (upon waking up in a tree undoubtedly covered in monkey shit, and with a killer case of morning breath) is apparently too much for aforementioned heroine. Not to mention that they somehow run across a desert somewhere in the Eastern Congo, which – of course – they must traverse to reach their final destination. (This scene is also eerily reminiscent of a similar sequence from Star Wars: maybe George Lucas was a fan?)

The most unintentionally funny parts are whenever Quatermain rescues the traveling band from a variety of scary creatures: spiders, snakes and big cats are apparently no match for his clumsy prowess, drawn straight from a long-lost Western story board. Seriously, after killing a crocodile, he actually blows the smoke off the end of his pistol’s barrel. Oh, and during one scene he picks up a large egg, and a baby crocodile just happens to hatch in his hand. Amazing… the list could go on.

So why bother?

Well, first, most of it was shot on location in the Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. The shots of landscape and wildlife are stunning, at times breathtaking – particularly the movement of large groups of animals, and the rolling hills of the Rwandan countryside. In this way, it is something like a Discovery Channel special from the pre-cable age.

Secondly, for the last 20-30 minutes of the film, starting with their welcome at the Tutsi King’s court (filmed at what looks to be the actual Mwami’s palace in Nyanza). Briefly, this movie was filmed in 1950. The ending of the film features actual Rwandans, speaking Kinyarwanda, doing Rwandan dances, in a fairly authentic reimagining of Tutsi courtly life. In 1959, this monarchy would be violently overthrown, 20-100,000 Tutsis would be killed, and another 150-200,000 refugees ran into neighboring countries. By 1964, the UN had registered 300,000 Rwandan refugees who had fled during repeated purges by a Hutu majority violently reacting to decades of servitude and oppression, which led to a 35-year, cyclical pattern of violence, culminating in the genocide of 1994.

In short – even if in a highly-reimagined, stylized Hollywood version – this movie has the first and last authentic Technicolor sequence of a culture that would implode into bloodshed and extinction less than ten years later. It is corny, it is patronizing, and it is most definitely not a documentary, but it certainly has historical value.

With the exception of that last 20-30 minutes, this is really not a very good movie. But it is somehow still worth a watch.