The movie starts off with a curveball right off the bat (no pun intended) with a woman performing a song "Anything Goes" for a group of Chinese gangsters. Weird, the other two Indiana Jones movies didn't opening with song numbers. Did Disney purchase Lucasfilm thirty years before they actually announced it? After that arguably catchy and enjoyable song is over, Indiana Jones himself appears and confronts Lao Che, a Chinese gangster who promised him a large diamond in exchange for the remains of Nurhachi, first emperor of the Manchu dynasty. It is during this meeting that Indy meets Willie Scott, the club singer for the nightspot "Club Obi-Wan" (wink, wink do ya get it? Wacka, wacka) in Shanghai. The deal goes south after Indy drinks poison and must trade back the diamond for the antidote. A shootout takes place that sees Indy and Willie escape into a car driven by Indy's young cohort, Short Round. The trio make their way to an airfield and escape on one of Lao Che's planes into the mountains of southern China. The plane is sabotaged and the trio are forced to escape into a river in remote India. There, they come across a village ravaged by the theft of their sacred Shankara stone, one of three. The village Shaman says that Shiva delivered Indiana Jones to the village to help them bring the stone back. Indiana, Willie and Short Round then venture to Pankot Palace to find the Shankara stone and return it and the children of the village, captured by an evil 'Thuggee' cult to be slaves and mine for the other two stones.
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| "I have here, the heart of that guy at Apple who took away your 3.5mm headphone jack!" |
Where the movie becomes absolutely uncomfortable and difficult to enjoy for people is when the group reaches Pankot Palace. Up until now, the movie has been very much like its highly popular and revered successor, Raiders of the Lost Ark, in terms of tone and adventure. Once they get to the palace, they're introduced to the Maharajah Zalim Singh and his prime minister, Chattar Lal, both of whom grow increasingly insulted by Indy's accusations that the palace is responsible for stealing the stone and the children of the village. That night, after someone attempts to take his life, Indiana and the others sneak into the catacombs of Pankot Palace and come across a Thuggee ceremony underground. What are "Thuggees" you might ask? Worshippers of Kali. Easy enough. In this satanic rhythmic Indian ritual, the high Thuggee priest Mola Ram finds a random slave and rips his heart out of his chest, sacrificing him to the goddess Kali before sending him into a fiery pit of molten material.
Good Christ alive. First of all, the scene is wicked intense with the chorus chanting and the John Williams score of beating drum seance music. Next, Mola Ram literally reaches into this poor guy's chest, pulls out his heart, and then cackles as it bursts into flames in the palm of his hand as the guy is lowered into his demise. I'll post the scene on YouTube down at the end of the post. You really have to see this to believe it. It may be completely tame considering what movies have shown us since then, but this is what followed Raiders. Holy jumping fucking shitballs. While that's weird, the movie gets even weird. Before this scene is the dinner scene with Chattar Lam and the Maharajah...which involves Indian kinsmen sitting with Willie and Short Round as they're served disgusting trays of food that are ordered up as "Indian delicacies". From slimy corn snakes inside the roasted body of a large cooked python, to a soup of bloody broth and eyeball chunks, to oyster-like beetle bodies with entrails you can just suck out...to chilled monkey heads with brains you can eat like ice cream. Seriously, look this shit up. This is all over the place. I mean...eww.
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| "Holy smokin' okie-dokin' french fried potaters Doctah Jones! They're sacrificing Indian people to Kali!" "Kid you come up with one more Robin-esque expression I'll have them sacrifice you next!" |
Soon, Mola Ram and the Thuggees capture Indy, tie him and Short Round to rock columns and whip them, then force Indy to drink forbidden material that then possesses him as they attempt to sacrifice Willie to Kali next. Indy hits Short Round in the face...like full-on whacks a child in the jaw with his fist, just before Short Round burns him with a torch and snaps him out of it. Indy then breaks up the Thuggee ceremony before freeing Willie and Short Round and heading into the mines to free the slave children. A brutal fight takes place where Indiana must fight the giant Thuggee cultist hand-to-hand, much like his fight with the German mechanic in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Except this time, the Maharajah cursed Indy by stealing a bit of his shirt for a voodoo doll. A doll which the dark prince uses to torture him while he gets his ass kicked by the large Thuggee. Oh good, for a minute there I thought voodoo and torture were aspects we left out of this otherwise wholesome family film. Thankfully, Short Round snaps the little jerk out of it. Fun fact, the German mechanic and the large Thuggee cultist were played by the same man, Pat Roach. He was originally going to play another large German in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that Indy fights hand-to-hand, but the idea was scrapped. He also died before he could play the large Russian general in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so that idea was scrapped as well. After the Thuggee gets crushed in a rolling stone rock crusher, the trio escape the mines in a truly thrilling action sequence: an escape through the mine tunnels on a cart. Several other Thuggees jump in carts and chase them and the whole sequence inspired a ride at (I believe) Disneyland. I don't know if the ride's still in operation or not, the movie is thirty-four years old, but still a notable tidbit.
The movie climaxes (heh) in a sort-of iconic and well known scene. If you've ever seen a shot of Indiana Jones standing with a torn up safari shirt and a sword on a rope bridge, this is where that's from. He chops the bridge's ropes and sends many Thuggee cultists falling into the gator-ridden river below to be eaten, including Mola Ram. Indy, Willie and Short Round then return to the village and replace the Shankara stone and the stolen child slaves before heading off to their next adventure, an adventure that neither Willie nor Short Round will be a part of. Fun fact #2: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is often credited with being one of two movies (The other of which being Gremlins) that greenlit the creation of the "PG-13" MPAA movie rating. The movie was PG, but traumatized so many young kids who went to see it that the MPAA was like "Okay, no. We need a rating to keep young, fragile minds out." Imagine being an eight-year-old kid and seeing people eating monkey brains and ripping hearts out of each others' chests? Try watching Barney the Dinosaur after seeing that shit.
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| "Sorry Mola Ram... looks like you just brought a bridge to a chasm fight!" |
It's interesting to note that a large reason for the movie's foreboding atmosphere and demented plot elements is the fact that both George Lucas (story) and Steven Spielberg (director) were going through divorces and neither of which were 'in a happy place' at the time. Many who have worked on the movie attribute its bizarre story, unsettling characters and misbehaving Indy on both mens' mentality at the time, especially Lucas who proposed many of the bizarre elements. You wonder where his balls went for the prequels, eh? Spielberg met his future wife Kate Capshaw, who plays Willie, on the set of this movie and George eventually lightened up in his own time producing movies like Howard the Duck and Labyrinth before Spielberg and he would reunite again in '89 for the much more light-hearted, well-received Raiders throwback Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade....but that's not to say you shouldn't count-out Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A surprising number of people do. What I've found is that a lot of people have only seen Raiders, Crusade and Crystal Skull. More people have seen Crystal Skull then even care to see this movie. I remember a high school conversation when I was a freshman. That would be about the time Crystal Skull came out. People were like "Yeah, Raiders was good and Crusade was good" and another kid went "Wasn't there another one?" to which everyone in the room was kind of just confused at the notion that maybe they forgot one.
So take it how you like it. I like to give it a watch every now and then, but that's just me. It's pretty common that with the four, soon five, Indiana Jones movies, everyone's either going to pick Raiders of the Lost Ark or Last Crusade as their favorite, but everyone seems to refuse to bat an eye at this one. It's the forgotten, often over-looked or ill-received middle child. Temple of Doom is still a fun ride with some compelling action scenes. The Fight in the Mine, the Minecart Escape, the Bridge Showdown, the Shanghai Shootout. The "Indiana Jones" aspect of the movie doesn't fail. It's just the mood, tone, supporting characters, their behaviors and plot elements that really don't sit well with people. I mean, honestly, really think about it. As I said, this was before PG-13 (but this helped create it). This was when it was just NR, G, PG, R and X. So you had ten and twelve-year-olds going into this movie alone and they see shit like what's below. I get it, at our age we think its the fun-kind of fucked up. While it's true that an argument can be made that Temple of Doom is a fun movie and a decent entry in the franchise, it's nameless side characters get tossed aside pretty easily, Willie gets annoying in five minutes flat, Short Round does so in ten, the Shankara Stones aren't really all that great of a choice for "the treasure" and to top it all off, did I mention it's morbid tone and how fucked up it gets? Good.
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