All you need to be is a damsel in distress, here Angela Greene, cornered by a black panther which in Jim's arms looks like a kitten. She's a beautiful anthropologist searching for a mysterious people, giants of the jungle and as mysterious as the forbidden land itself. This has one of the better setups for the mid series, outwearing its welcome except for the kids who rushed to these on Saturday morning and the later youthful TV audiences who clamored for Tarzan, Bombs and any look back at the ever popular but dying serials so popular in those last days of the golden age of cinema. That's when they made em' fast, made em' cheap, and made em' in bulk. As long as Jim and his chimp pal Tamba cavorted through the African wilds, they could find an audience.Smartly, this shows the raid on Greene's canoe by dangerous hippos, reminding us of the dangers of these seemingly peaceful herbivores. Johnny Weissmuller deserves credit for going as long as he could, dealing once again with on-the-warpath natives, elephant poachers and Styrofoam sets. They actually name the tribal chief "Zulu", and there's a mysterious prophet like character named "the old one". Lester Matthews and Jean Willed are the obvious bad guys, part of Jim's expedition for nefarious reasons, utilizing truth serum to find out what they need to know. This seems to be a little more polished than previous episodes which were mostly rushed. A plot twist borrowed from "Island of Lost Souls" adds to the intrigue. Danger at every turn and a steady, fun pace puts this at above average.

31/100. This is the eighth entry in the Jungle Jim series, and unfortunately not the last. The were profitable at the time, mainly because the had minuscule budgets. As with most in the series, the plot is lame and stupid. This time he gets entangled with a greedy and evil ivory hunter. That's not all folks, he also has to grapple with a "giant man," in bad make up, a phony looking costume and a desperate need for a dentist. As with all in the films in the series, a lot of obvious stock footage is used, and a menagerie of animals that in reality do not co-exist anywhere in the universe. The acting is, as expected, poor, the art direction painfully obvious. The film looks as though it took perhaps a week to film.

"In the Forbidden Land" seems to me to have a weaker and less focused screenplay compared to the other JJ episode I've seen (the one where he goes looking for a missing football player). Or maybe seeing another one helped me realize just how perfunctory and by-the-numbers this series really was. But the performances were about the same, and the effects and sound stages and liberal use of stock footage and white actors was about the same. Johnny himself still looked reasonably fit (for a 1950s actor who didn't know anything about modern theories of resistance training or nutrition) in his one extended shirtless scene, which is always good for a viewers' morale.Goofy mistakes and second rate production elements abound, of course. A hippo attacks a canoe and eats one of the paddlers (aren't hippos herbivores?).Jim alternates fighting a stuffed panther with stock footage shots of a real one snarling at the camera. "Giant people" from a lost tribe turn out to resemble werewolves (rather than "missing links"). Asian elephants are outfitted with tusks and ear prostheses in an effort to resemble African elephants (at least they knew the difference). There's random footage of "Tamba" the chimp being "cute" that has no connection to almost anything else in the plot and is just there because, hey, people expect a chimp sidekick for Johnny. And every one in the plot is rock stupid. The final third of the plot involves Jim being framed for murder (apparently the commissioner was supposed to think that Jim shot himself full of pentathol and clubbed himself unconscious) but not being allowed to explain what happened because they've gagged him. (The stated reason is that they don't want him to "call for help from his animal friends". The real reason is that the plot twist wouldn't last for 30 seconds if Jim was allowed to speak).Still, if you choose to watch a "Jungle Jim" adventure in this day and age, you either want to relive the experience of being 8 years old and watching a Saturday afternoon matinée, or else you are an archivist and collector of all similar things from that era. In either case, you parked your brain at the door at the beginning of the film. (I'm not sneering - I enjoy certain pop culture items from my childhood far more than they deserve on their actual merits.) So here you are: enjoy!

Gee, what would have possessed Jungle Jim (Johnny Weissmuller) to take on a hippo, and under water no less? That's one of the offerings in 'The Forbidden Land', as the jungle hero aids an anthropologist seeking the fabled Land of Giant People. When a couple of the 'giants' actually appear for the first time, my first thought was who might have raided Lon Chaney's Wolfman wardrobe. If you take all the Jungle Jim films together, this would have to be right up there with the goofiest, if not the most dangerous for Jim. He would actually have been a goner if not for chimp sidekick Tamba wielding a coconut bean ball when the male giant had him down for the count.For trivia fans, it's finally revealed here that Jim's home is near Ingaba Lake in the Wasabi District, even though most of his earlier stories took place in the Nagandi District. Or maybe he just moved. This film more than any of Weismuller's other Jungle Jim flicks looks like it was slapped together with as many elements as possible and as little coherence necessary to pull off the story. For example - 'The Old One', the wise old man of Tiku. In the scene establishing that he was blind, he fires off the film's cleverest line - "When eyes are dead, heart must see". That advice was never needed again.The story itself involves ivory poachers, merely tall 'giant' people, and Jim tackling the earlier mentioned hippo and a black panther. Oh yes, and he's injected with a truth serum to reveal the location of the giant homeland. It would be interesting to hear Weissmuller express his thoughts about the picture after being injected with truth serum.Keeping track of non African animals in an African setting? This one has a South American jaguar battling a bush hog. As for that black panther, it's hilarious to watch it turn into a stuffed animal and back during it's wrestling match with Jim; as always, no blood drawn against the intrepid jungle tracker.Second chances notwithstanding, Weissmuller tries to do as much as he can with the material he's given, but is shown to best advantage in his swimming and diving scenes. Not as trim as in his earlier Tarzan days, but still impressive enough. But can you really kill a hippo using just a knife?