'TRADER HORN'......THE DEATH OF MGM BY COBRA.....

 Trader Horn (1973)   Rod Taylor's always been a BQ fave, an unsung, underappreciated leading man who effortlessly straddled multiple genres.....from the roughest of rough 'n tumble action adventures ("Dark Of The Sun", "Darker Then Amber") to the fluffliest of romantic comedies ("Sunday In New York" and his two Doris Day romcoms, "The Glass Bottom Boat" and "Do Not Disturb")......not to mention his roles in two now legendary films, "The Time Machine" and Hitchcock's "The Birds".

           Which is why we felt so sorry on his behalf that he stumbled into this worthless piece of wreckage left over from the toxic reign over MGM by James T. Aubrey (a.k.a. 'The Smiling Cobra')

            Aubrey, a rapacious corporate reptile, strip-mined his way through MGM, pumping out some garbage movies of his own while slicing and dicing up other directors' films for the studio.

             'Trader Horn' may stand as the most defining movie of the awful Aubrey tenure......a brazen attempt to slap together a rock-bottom cheap movie with almost 60 per cent of its footage exhumed from an older movie collecting dust in the MGM vault

              So off we go to the wildest, darkest Africa of "Trader Horn", which consists of Rod Taylor and the other actors wandering through their scenes shot in the woods of a Los Angeles public park.....

               But every time they turn around, the film cuts to huge chunks of grainy, washed out sequences extracted from 1950's "King Solomon's Mines".

                You can almost hear Aubrey on the soundtrack, cackling about all the money he's saving.

                On and on this goes, for 101 unendurable minutes.......and any movie buff who reveled in MGM's once golden age could almost weep at the sight of this mess........a film bearing the MGM roaring lion that's barely one step up from "Plan 9 From Outer Space"

                  Granted, by the 1970's, all the major studios sat in various stages of disarray, destruction and financial distress.  The upside: since no one in charge of studios had any idea what audiences wanted, a slew of young, hungry, hotly talented young filmmakers got their foot in the door and their films produced.

                  The downside: the rise of sharks like Aubrey, who ripped apart what was left of Hollywood with  their malignant greed and wrong headed decisions.

                 For the presence of Rod Taylor, we felt slightly inclined to give out 1/2 of a star.......

                 Sorry.....as much as love Rod, we couldn't do it. The whole existence of this movie is an insult to cinema. Zero stars (0).