If you consider yourself a completist of the "Tarzan" cinematic universe—or a glutton for punishment when it comes to low-budget 90s erotic thrillers—you may have stumbled across a VHS ghost: Tarzan: The Shame of Jane (1995).
Yes, that title is real. No, it is not a lost adult film (though it dances right up to that line). It is, in fact, one of the strangest, most baffling entries in the long, weird history of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ape-man.
Let’s swing into the vines and dissect this oddity. tarzan shame of jane 1995
Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first: this is not the Disney version. There are no singing gorillas and no Phil Collins soundtrack. Tarzan: Shame of Jane is strictly for the Skinemax crowd.
The film follows the classic beats, but with the volume turned up on the hormones. Jane is a scientist (or sometimes an explorer, depending on how loosely the script is following logic) who gets lost in the jungle. She encounters the Ape Man, and instead of learning him some English and bringing him to civilization, she decides the jungle life is pretty good—mostly because the Jungle King is a chiseled Adonis who doesn't speak much but looks great in a loincloth. If you consider yourself a completist of the
The 1995 iteration is notable for leaning heavily into the "beauty and the beast" dynamic. The Tarzan here is feral, largely mute, and aggressive. Jane is the stand-in for the viewer—initially terrified, eventually intrigued, and finally... well, you can guess the rest.
No major critic reviewed "Tarzan: Shame of Jane" upon its 1995 release. It bypassed theaters entirely, premiering on a now-defunct pay-per-view channel called “HotVisions” before hitting VHS in Germany, Brazil, and the Philippines. The few contemporaneous reviews from genre magazines like VideoMania and The Psychotronic Video Guide were brutal. “Tarzan: Shame of Jane is not so much a film as a felony
One surviving quote from Cult Movies magazine (Issue 34, 1996) reads:
“Tarzan: Shame of Jane is not so much a film as a felony. The acting is flatter than the jungle floor. The eroticism is about as arousing as a tax audit. And yet… you cannot look away. It is the cinematic equivalent of discovering a forgotten sock drawer in a condemned house.”
Modern viewers on Letterboxd and Reddit’s r/badMovies have ironically celebrated the film. User JungleJudy99 writes: “The ‘shame’ theme is so heavy-handed that Jane literally weeps for twenty minutes. But Manson’s Tarzan keeps signing ‘you’re welcome’ with his armpit. It’s surrealist gold.”