MIKE HENRY FINISHING WITH 'TARZAN AND THE JUNGLE BOY'

Mike Henry in Aliza Gur in TARZAN AND THE JUNGLE BOY Year: 1968 Rates: **

By 1968, when the third and final Mike Henry TARZAN movie hit theaters, the television series starring Ron Ely and Mike's former sidekick Manual Padilla Jr had already almost run its course, because TARZAN AND THE JUNGLE BOY was made in 1965 and shelved for three years...

Beginning like Edgar Rice Burroughs' original story since the titular JUNGLE BOY was abandoned and raised there, so Tarzan can surely relate... only it's the villain's brother, literally played by returning actor Rafer Johnson's lookalike sibling Edward Johnson, who searches for and eventually rescues the kid...

Mike Henry in TARZAN AND THE JUNGLE BOY

The bamboo bridges built upon a craggy mountain of endless waterfalls is reused from TARZAN AND THE GREAT RIVER, where Rafer had played another antagonist but from a different region... there the Amazon, here back in Africa... yet both filmed in South America, where the locations are effective except for intrusively-grainy archive footage of genuine wildlife...

And as the kid (Steve Bond) becomes a wishbone for the Johnson brothers, Mike Henry sort of comes and goes, almost like he's watching another movie while basically ghost-starring in what's supposedly his very own TARZAN swansong: hardly even able to swing with gorgeous ingenue Aliza Gur, by far his hottest, spiciest Jane-surrogate yet.

Mike Henry in Aliza Gur in TARZAN AND THE JUNGLE BOY

Mike Henry in TARZAN AND THE JUNGLE BOY

Rafer Johnson and Edward Johnson in TARZAN AND THE JUNGLE BOY

Aliza Gur in TARZAN AND THE JUNGLE BOY