Of Dreck & Drink: Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold and Straight to Ale Illudium

You know, in retrospect I’m actually a little surprised it took this long for me to do a Golan-Globus film.

Few names in the filmmaking industry are connected to so many terrible movies, especially when we limit ourselves to a one-decade period. It’s true that the 1980s in particular were in many ways a golden age of the low-budget B movie, but even when stacked up against the other creative forces of that neon-colored decade, the producing team of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus rises above. Seriously, drink in this list one prolific, terrifying body of work.

Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold is in many respects a typical Golan-Globus movie in that it’s simultaneously serviceable and cheap-looking, an amateurish attempt at evoking movies that had a much more genuine, “cinematic” appeal. You watch it, and something just feels implacably off. Is it the actors? Maybe. The effects? Probably. The glaring lack of humor in any of the moments apparently meant to be humorous? Almost certainly. From the moment its imitation John Williams soundtrack fires up, it presents a palpable sense of uncomfortable déjà vu.

This brings us to the easiest way to define Allan Quatermain, which is to simply invoke what it’s trying to mimic—the Indiana Jones series. There’s no subtlety here, nor any attempt to deny the movie’s purpose. In theory, Allan Quatermain is just another of those classic, Doc Savage-style adventurers ripped from the pages of pulp fiction: White, dashing, studious and occasionally bare-chested. But in film execution, it’s simple: He’s Indiana Jones. “Bargain-bin Indy” would be too generous—he’s a severely damaged, foreign-made Indiana Jones knock-off placed on an empty rack with a big, orange “Manager’s Special 90% off” sticker on him.

But hey, if that doesn’t scream “the adventure of a lifetime,” I don’t know what does! Our premise is certainly some classic pulp stuff: A dying man stumbles into Quatermain’s African camp babbling about a lost city of gold, pursued by murderous natives. All of your classic racist tropes are there: The city of gold was created by a “lost white race” in the middle of Africa. Everything is apparently fabulous there—could the whiteness of its inhabitants be somehow linked? You think?

So, what sort of craft beer does one pair with Allan Quatermain? For tonight’s experiment, I’ve chosen Straight to Ale’s Illudium, won over immediately by its spectacularly appropriate label art. Rarely have I had access to imagery that fits the theme so well. The actual product is a massive, English-style “old ale,” which typically means a rich, malty brew stocked away to be aged. It might not be something you’d guard with an entire temple full of deadly traps and guards in feathered headdresses, but for our purposes, it’s just about perfect.

The film, meanwhile, is truly a pain to watch. In my heart, I know that practically everything I’ve ever watched in the course of doing these columns has been far worse from a technical standpoint, but there’s simply something irritating in the characters in Allan Quatermain. They get under your skin, especially Sharon Stone, who plays the love interest in what may be her worst-ever screen appearance. She tears into the role like she really admired Kate Capshaw’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom performance and made a point of adopting all of its most garish characteristics. She literally spends so much time in peril and needing immediate rescue that Quatermain at one point perks up his ears and announces: “I know that scream” to his compatriots after hearing her shriek in the distance. For him, this is just something that happens every Tuesday.