INTRODUCTION: TARZAN-LITE IN A GLOSSY, BARELY-THERE LOINCLOTH
When it hit theaters in 1984, Sheena was meant to be a female-fronted answer to the pulpy adventure stories of the ’30s and ’40s, polished with glossy Reagan-era sheen and nudity. But instead of roaring like the jungle cat it promised to be, Sheena purred lazily through a story full of recycled clichés, limp action, and wooden performances. And yet… it remains oddly watchable. Not for its plot, not for its dialogue, and certainly not for its pacing—but for one reason and one reason only: Tanya Roberts. The film drips with slow-motion shots of Roberts galloping on horseback, swimming through waterfalls, and walking confidently through the jungle wearing just enough fabric to technically qualify as clothed. Her body is the star of the movie—and if we’re honest, the only thing saving it from total extinction.
PLOT: BORN IN THE WILD, BETTER LEFT THERE
The plot of Sheena is cobbled together from several outdated colonial tropes and comic book back issues that should have stayed buried in the desert sand. Sheena is a blonde orphan raised by the Zambouli, a fictional African tribe, after her parents die in a convenient cave collapse while on a mystical dig. The Zambouli raise Sheena as one of their own and imbue her with the sacred ability to communicate telepathically with animals, an ability she uses frequently but without much logic. She can mentally summon elephants, zebras, lions, birds—and yes, a few rhinos too, although they mostly just run around looking confused.
Years later, Sheena becomes entangled in a political assassination plot involving the corrupt Prince Otwani (Trevor Thomas), who wants to seize power from his noble brother, King Jabalani. The good king is framed and murdered, the Zambouli are blamed, and Sheena is forced to flee with an American journalist, Vic Casey (Ted Wass), while trying to clear her people’s name and overthrow Otwani. It sounds exciting on paper, like something that could have some pulp energy—but on screen, it plays out like a soap opera that’s had one too many sedatives.
DIRECTION: A SAFARI OF MUDDLED TONES
Directed by John Guillermin, who also directed The Towering Inferno and the 1976 remake of King Kong, Sheena is surprisingly aimless. Guillermin had proven he could handle spectacle before, but here he seems adrift in the tall grass. The film never decides what it wants to be. Is it a sweeping epic? A campy comic book flick? A feminist empowerment tale with cleavage? A PG-13 softcore adventure? It tries to be all of those and ends up being none.
The pacing is glacial. Scenes that should be tense—like jungle escapes or confrontations—are dulled by poor editing and limp staging. Even the animal stunts feel repetitive and uninspired. Every third scene is some variation of “Sheena gallops in slow motion on her pale horse” or “Sheena stares meaningfully at an elephant.” What’s missing is urgency, surprise, or narrative propulsion.
SCRIPT: A DICTIONARY OF DEADLINES AND DUMBNESS
The screenplay, co-written by David Newman (of Superman fame) and Lorenzo Semple Jr. (Flash Gordon), lacks any of the zing or self-aware camp that made those other projects so memorable. Sheena takes itself too seriously for a story that hinges on a half-naked telepathic woman fighting corrupt royalty with a rhino stampede.
The dialogue is painfully literal. Characters spend entire scenes explaining the plot to each other in bland, expository chunks. No one has a distinctive voice. No one is clever or funny. The villains monologue with all the subtlety of a mid-tier Bond parody, and the romantic dialogue between Sheena and Vic is so dry it could be used to light a campfire.
There’s no bite, no edge, no wink. For a movie featuring Tanya Roberts riding horseback in nothing but a loincloth and beads, it’s astonishingly joyless.
ACTING: A CASE STUDY IN THEATRICAL INERTIA
Let’s talk about the performances—because we have to. Tanya Roberts, bless her, is trying. She’s clearly been put through physical training, she’s doing her own stunts, and she gives every frame her ethereal, wide-eyed beauty. But her line delivery is often flat, as if she learned the lines phonetically in a dream. There’s little variation in her tone—whether she’s calling elephants, mourning her adoptive father, or kissing Vic Casey, she sounds like she’s waiting to be told “cut.”
Still, it’s hard to be too harsh on Roberts. She’s playing a thankless role in a film that views her more as scenery than protagonist. Sheena is supposed to be this noble warrior of the wild, but she rarely makes decisions that drive the story forward. She’s acted upon more than she acts, and her powers are inconsistently written. One moment she can call giraffes with her mind; the next, she’s fleeing like a model lost on a National Geographic set.
Ted Wass, as Vic Casey, is miscast and misused. He’s a sitcom actor (Soap, Blossom) trying to play a romantic lead in an action movie, and it doesn’t work. He looks uncomfortable in every scene, like he wandered onto the wrong soundstage but decided to roll with it. His chemistry with Roberts is non-existent, which makes their forced romance feel like a contractual obligation rather than an organic development.
Trevor Thomas and Clifton Jones, playing the villain and the noble king respectively, do what they can, but the script gives them so little dimension that they become walking tropes. It’s all tribal masks and “mystical” music with none of the nuance or context that might make this world feel real.
TANYA ROBERTS: THE SUN-DRENCHED CENTERPIECE
Let’s not pretend here—Tanya Roberts is the reason people remember Sheena. Her body is the film’s main special effect. Her wardrobe, which consists of a leather bikini, an occasional sheer shawl, and nothing else, is photographed like a centerfold spread. She bathes in waterfalls, wrestles in the mud, rides bareback across the African plains, and practically glows in every frame.
This is fantasy cinema through a very male gaze, and Roberts is presented less as a character and more as a centerfold that occasionally throws a spear. But even within that exploitative frame, there’s something undeniably compelling about her presence. She has that old-school, poster-girl magnetism—unapologetically sexy, somewhat aloof, and just wild enough to seem untouchable.
Her physicality carries the film in a way no dialogue or plot point ever could. Sheena’s relationship with nature might not be believable, but you buy it because Roberts looks like she belongs outdoors. She looks like she is the jungle—untamed, golden, and constantly lit by an imaginary spotlight. You come for the story (or try to), but you stay because Tanya Roberts refuses to let the camera look away.
CINEMATOGRAPHY AND SETTING: POSTCARDS FROM A BETTER MOVIE
John Guillermin at least brought along a decent cinematographer. The film was shot on location in Kenya, and the African landscape is breathtaking. Sweeping vistas, golden savannahs, lush jungles, and majestic animals—all beautifully captured in widescreen glory. The scenery is so good it occasionally makes you forget how dumb the story is.
There are moments when Sheena threatens to become a better movie, visually. When Sheena rides her horse across an empty plain at sunset, or stands on a cliff with an eagle perched beside her, you almost believe you’re watching something mythic. But then someone opens their mouth and starts talking again, and the illusion breaks.
THE ANIMALS: UNPAID CO-STARS WHO DESERVE BETTER
The use of live animals in Sheena is both ambitious and problematic. The animals—zebras, rhinos, elephants, and big cats—are real and in-frame, and that’s impressive in an era before CGI. But it’s also obvious they were uncomfortable and, in some cases, dangerously forced into scenes for the sake of spectacle.
There are chase sequences and attacks that clearly stress the animals, and watching them be used like props takes the fun out of it. Worse, the connection between Sheena and her animal companions feels arbitrary. Sometimes she uses her telepathy; other times she just whistles. It’s a plot device, not a relationship, and it makes her “powers” feel more like lazy screenwriting than mysticism.
MUSIC AND TONE: BANGING DRUMS, MISSING HEART
Richard Hartley’s musical score is serviceable but forgettable. There’s a lot of tribal drumming, pan flutes, and orchestral swells meant to convey exoticism and wonder, but it never quite clicks. It feels like a temp track that never got replaced with a real score.
And that leads to the film’s central tonal problem: it doesn’t know whether it wants to be campy fun or noble epic. If it had leaned into its own absurdity—if it had embraced the pulp, the sexiness, the wildness—it might have found a loyal cult audience. Instead, it hesitates, and in doing so, ends up in a no-man’s-land of blandness. Not fun enough to be Barbarella, not smart enough to be Wonder Woman, and not thrilling enough to be Tarzan.
LEGACY: A CULT FOOTNOTE AND A LATE-NIGHT STAPLE
Sheena was a critical and commercial flop upon release. It bombed at the box office, received Razzie nominations, and quietly faded into VHS obscurity. But over time, it found a second life on cable television, late-night movie marathons, and the adolescent memories of boys who stumbled upon it while flipping through channels after midnight.
It never became the feminist icon vehicle it pretended to be. It never joined the pantheon of great fantasy films. But it carved a niche as a kind of beautiful disaster—one that lives on in posters, paused VHS tapes, and nostalgia-fueled rewatches.
CONCLUSION: BARELY WORTH THE JOURNEY, BUT WORTH A LOOK
Sheena isn’t a good movie—not by any traditional measure. The story is thin, the acting is weak, and the pacing could cure insomnia. But for all its faults, it still holds a strange allure. Maybe it’s the exotic locations. Maybe it’s the innocent sincerity of its ambition. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s Tanya Roberts.
Because at the end of the day, Sheena survives on the strength of Roberts’ body, her commitment to looking mythic, and the film’s willingness to turn her into the ultimate jungle fantasy. The movie may not swing from the trees, but it sways just enough to stay upright.
Score: 4.5/10 – Two points for the scenery, one for the animals, and 1.5 for Tanya Roberts’ loincloth doing all the heavy lifting.
