Directed by the prolific B-movie auteur Joe D’Amato (under the pseudonym "John B. Root"), Tarzan X is a bizarre, often tedious, yet strangely fascinating time capsule. It’s important to set expectations immediately: this is not a film for fans of Burroughs’ novels, Disney animation, or even competent filmmaking. This is a film for connoisseurs of the so-bad-it’s-compelling, the lurid, and the unintentionally hilarious.

Is it worth your time? That depends entirely on your tolerance for 90s softcore aesthetics and your ability to laugh at incompetence. As a piece of erotic cinema, it fails – it’s not sexy, it’s awkward. As an action film, it fails – the stunts are pathetic. As a Tarzan adaptation, it’s an insult to the source material.

In the mid-1990s, the erotic thriller boom was in full swing, spurred on by the mainstream success of Basic Instinct and the explosion of late-night cable programming. It was a time when producers would grab any public domain character and thrust them (often literally) into a softcore scenario. Enter Tarzan X , a film that attempts to answer the question no one asked: What if Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Lord of the Apes was reimagined as a hunky, leather-clad, amnesiac action hero with a penchant for steamy jungle trysts?