MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Cooktopi The acting in this movie is really good.

filippaberry84 I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Michael_Elliott Tarzan and the Trappers (1958) * 1/2 (out of 4) The twentieth film in the original MGM-to-RKO series wasn't originally meant to be a movie. No, instead producer Sol Lesser decided to save some money and try to produce a TV series so he brought in Gordon Scott to make three pilots. He showed all three pilots to the television networks but they all turned it down so instead of eating his losses the producer instead edited the three episodes together and turn it into this film. WIth this in mind, there's a reason everything is so messy. In the film, Tarzan (Scott) must battle an evil man wanting to steal animals from the jungle. After Tarzan stops him the man's brother comes and decides to hunt the ape man THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME style. Then, after that business is taken care of, Tarzan must try and stop some men looking for a lost city. All three "stories" don't mix well together and especially when the first one ends and then minutes later the guy's brother is already on the scene looking for revenge! It's really hard to take any of this movie serious considering how it was made but even if you just view the stories as three separate TV shows it still feels rather cheap. The previous movie had the producer spending a pretty dime as he sent the company to Africa, shot it in color and obviously those high standards are missing here. We're back to B&W, poor stock footage and rather cheap stories. Scott doesn't look overly thrilled in any of the stories but I'm going to guess that he wasn't too happy about the TV stuff. He's always made for a good Tarzan but this here was certainly a weak spot. Eve Brent shows up as Jane and Rickie Sorensen appears as Boy but neither are too memorable and neither have their roles written too well. TARZAN AND THE TRAPPERS should have been left unreleased but you know a producer has to make his money back and that's the only reason this was released. That still doesn't mean people should waste their time watching it.

zardoz-13 Gordon Scott's second outing as the eponymous Edgar Rice Burroughs hero shares a lot in common with a traditional Johnny Weissmuller "Tarzan" movie. First, the Lord of the Jungle speaks in choppy sentences. Second, Tarzan has no back story relating to how he came to Africa. Third, co-directors Charles Haas and Sandy Howard rely on the chimp Cheta for comic relief. Cheta discovers the consequences of messing around with bees. Fourth, Tarzan has an educated Jane at his side and provides life lessons for a teenage Boy who runs around in a loincloth, too. Unlike Tarzan, Boy does communicate in complete sentences and knows how to read. Meantime, "Tarzan and the Trappers" bears a slight resemblance to "Tarzan's New York Adventure," except these trappers do not succeed in kidnapping Boy, though they take him hostage for a while. Scott makes a terrific Tarzan, and he is clearly the most muscular Ape man to grace the silver screen. Eva Brent looks like she walked out of a designer fashion saloon in her Jane outfit with her coiffed hair and lipstick. Were it not for Tarzan and Cheta, she wouldn't survive long in the jungle. When we first see Jane, she is curled up and sleeping without a thought about her safety when a poisonous snake slithers over her legs. Cheta awakens Jane; Jane shrieks and kicks the snake off. Cheta attacks the snake with a stick and beats it to death. This man, woman, and child, none of whom appear to be related, live in the tree houses in the jungle.Numerous sources, far too many to document, indicate that "Tarzan and the Trappers" was a pilot for a proposed television series that did not make the cut. The production values look solid enough and this cobbled together feature is unified by Tarzan's quest to thwart illegal trappers. He ruins one trapper and has the fellow sentenced to prison and that trapper's brother decides to hunt Tarzan like something out of "The Most Dangerous Game." Of course, the flaws are really obvious. Most of the time that Tarzan appears in a scene with other actors, it is clear that they are in an elaborate studio set. Tarzan spends his time belting out his signature call, probably more than any Tarzan. He swims in crocodile-infested rivers, swings on apparently real vines, and even rides a giraffe. In most of the scenes with Tarzan charging and swinging through the jungle, it does appear to be Scott performing his own stunts. Indeed, Scott would be a difficult man to double with his physique and hair. The scene where he questions two gun bears as to their native heritage by demanding that they dance is good. It is fun to see them try to make Tarzan when they get the drop on him with a high-powered, bolt-action rifle. Tarzan refuses to dance, even as they blast the earth near his toes. Eventually, the one with the gun jams it and Tarzan teaches them a lesson. Mind you, the biggest flaw in this good versus evil epic is that nobody is in trouble for long. A dastardly big game hunter shoots one animal—an elephant, but it is pretty clear that the falling elephant was probably lensed getting up. The filmmakers printed the footage backwards to make it appear as if the beast was just struck by a bullet and knocked down.Altogether, "Tarzan and the Trappers" qualifies as a serviceable Tarzan, but it cannot compare with later Tarzan sagas like "Tarzan's Greatest Adventure" and "Tarzan the Magnificent." Clocking in at a mere 70 minutes, "Tarzan and the Trappers" is a modest adventure that never looks too cheesy.

Cristi_Ciopron Tarzan, the environmental awareness leader, faces four trappers who by most unorthodox means abduct animals to get them to Zoos. Tarzan has a bland but sexy enough wife with an impeccable hairdo, and a kid. No one should fault Tarzan for being grieved by the vicious actions of the hunters.This Gordon Scott Tarzan flick is one of the silliest, completely and unnecessarily silly; for one reason or another, the team did not find anything charming to sustain the movie, and so it's just some silly rubbish. Tarzan and his family are threatened by a group of evil trappers ,because Tarzan's environmental awareness brought him into open conflict with the evildoers. The kid and the chimpanzee, both belonging to Tarzan, are kidnapped by the malevolent trappers; so Tarzan summons the unleashed animal forces of the jungle to release the kid and the chimp—with Tarzan leading the attack. TARZAN AND THE TRAPPERS is silly, unappealing, quite uninteresting. Maybe as a kid I would have liked it? Now one has to be too mean—as viciously mean as those pathetic trappers punished by Tarzan—to ask a Tarzan flick not to be silly; this I concede. But one is also truly entitled to ask these Tarzan flicks, however silly, to have and to show some gusto—a bit of gusto—even a tiny bit of gusto. Some kick, some excitement, some fun. Now the Gordon Scott Tarzan failure is too silly exactly in the sense of not having any gusto at all, of lacking all excitement. (Yes, I liked the sequence of the jungle beast eating a snake. What beast? Watch the movie, kiddos, now here I just gave you one excuse to do so.) For one reason or another, the villains look somewhat pathetic and elicit mercy rather than virtuous anger.The books leave the impression that Tarzan seemed quite bright in his own way; and if finding a decent bodybuilder or another sportsman to look clever enough for the role might prove a too demanding, next to impossible task, Gordon Scott was anyway too far from meeting that ideal.The wife chides Tarzan for disliking books.The script suggests Tarzan was uneducated, almost illiterate, and adverse to learning; but the book says otherwise, and we know that Tarzan studied much, by himself, using the books of his gone family, before even meeting white people.And I did not like that yell.(It's supposed, dear kiddos, to be a genuine wild yell, not a missed yodeler.)

dinky-4 The Tarzan you grow up is likely to always be "your" Tarzan, so for the generation which came of age in the 1950s, that means Gordon Scott. He might not have been the best Tarzan, (that's always a matter of debate), but he was certainly a good one. His "Tarzan and the Trappers" is a minor work, apparently stitched together from some TV episodes, but it demonstrates how the Tarzan character reflects the changing moods of the times. In this case, the times are the Eisenhower Years and so Tarzan, Jane, and Boy come across here as a typical suburban family not that far removed from, say, "Ozzie and Harriet." Of course, the father in this particular family seems to speak with a third-grade education and he must spend an awful lot of time in the gym, but these are minor points."Tarzan and the Trappers" also reflects the prudish morality of the 1950s. Tarzan and Jane, for example, seem to have two side-by-side but separate treehouses which allows for "proper" sleeping arrangements. Care has also been taken to downplay Tarzan's sexuality, moving him away from his powerful masculinity toward a tamer, almost neutered status. Gordon Scott's loincloth, for instance, rides high enough on his torso to completely hide his navel, which must have caused some problems during filming. ("Sorry, Gordon, you'll have to do it again. We saw your belly button.") And in that inevitable scene in which Tarzan is captured and put into bondage, his arms stretched up and tied high above his head, we see that Gordon Scott's armpits have been carefully shaved. Apparently male body hair, either on the chest or in the armpits, was a "no no" because it emphasized the actor's sexual nature. Despite these efforts to "housebreak" and "domesticate" Tarzan, however, Gordon Scott still manages to exude an undeniable appeal and for us Eisenhower kids, he'll always be "our" Tarzan.