THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS (35)

Directed by: Stephen Hopkins

Starring: Val Kilmer, Michael Douglas, Tom Wilkinson

The Pitch: The building of a bridge in colonial Africa is threatened by a marauding pair of man-eating lions.

Theo Sez: A wannabe monster-movie in JAWS vein, done in mostly by showing too much of its monsters but probably doomed anyway, just because said monsters - a pair of jungle lions, as per the title - simply aren't particularly scary : all the talk about how they're "more than lions", spirits of dead medicine-men, manifestations of Pure Evil, leonine homicidal psychos ("My God!" says our hero ; "They kill for pleasure!") and so on doesn't really do much except point up the basic problem, especially when the action scenes are so unimaginative - by the end it's almost unintentionally funny to hear so much introductory mumbo-jumbo only to see a pair of very ordinary-looking lions baring their teeth and padding across the screen. It might've done better (as it does, promisingly, in its early stages) to cut the action-movie thrills and point up the African angle - the Continent's dark romance, as evinced in the books of Jules Verne or H. Rider Haggard - and go for eerie atmospherics, with the lions left unseen as much as possible ; as it stands it's hollow, and a little boring.