Romancing The Stone (1984)

This dumb comic-book adventure has no comedy and is actually a less harrowing adventure than a peak hour trip on the subway. In short, it is awful.

Kathleen Turner, the sweaty sexpot from Body Heat (1981), plays Joan Wilder – a spinster and writer of trashy best-selling romance novels.

When her sister gets kidnapped in Colombia, the poor girl flies to South America to rescue her. Lost in the jungle when her bus is hijacked, she ends up hiking through banana trees with a caddish parrot collector named Jack T. Coltan (Michael Douglas) – “The T stands for Trustworthy”.

For the first hour of this interminable bore, they glide down mudslides, fly across rapids on Tarzan vines, and dodge machine gun bullets while she hangs on for dear life to a crude map mailed to her in Manhattan by her murdered brother-in-law.

It takes the rest of the movie to unravel the mystery of just what this is all about (something about a giant green emerald the size of a milk bottle) and even then it doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Margot Kidder and Robert Hays hacked their way through the same threadbare plot in Trenchcoat with the same results: tedium.

And when you finally get to the emerald, buried inside a ceramic rabbit that looks like a myopic door prize at a Tupperware party, you’re most likely going to wish you’d stayed in bed with a good book.

Michael Douglas, who also produced Romancing the Stone, looks greasy-haired, seedy, and ravaged beyond belief. Kathleen Turner is still quite a looker, even though she spends a dismayingly inordinate amount of time in the movie looking like she’s just been released from an intensive care unit after being hit by a bus.

Douglas, Turner and DeVito went on to make a sequel, The Jewel Of The Nile in 1985.

Jack T Colton
Michael Douglas
Joan Wilder
Kathleen Turner
Ralph
Danny Devito
Ira
Zack Norman
Juan
Alfonso Arau
Zolo
Manuel Ojeda
Gloria
Holland Taylor
Elaine
Mary Ellen Trainor
Mrs Irwin
Eve Smith
Super
Joe Nesnow
Santos
José Chávez

Director
Robert Zemeckis