SATURDAY AFTERNOON SLAUGHTER: "Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom" (1984) Is Secretly One of the Darkest Horror Films of the ’80s

Written by: Jase Marsiglia

Some will scoff at the idea that one of the most beloved characters in cinema, the great Indiana Jones, could have a film in its series that could be construed as a horror film. In a franchise that has always skirted the paranormal in Indy’s quests to obtain or protect ancient relics with the power to rule or destroy the world, we’ve seen ghosts with the ability to melt faces by pure, biblical rage, cursed cups that accelerate aging a lifetime to mere seconds, aliens that can burn enough information into someone’s brain that their heads explode and they incinerate, and the perils of attempting time travel without double-checking calculus.

Many won’t believe there’s a reason that "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" deserves to be reviewed on a horror site called Truly Disturbing, lumping it into the same league as "A Nightmare on Elm Street", "Halloween", or "Friday the 13th."

Like hell there isn’t. Hold on to your potatoes!

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

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This first sequel in the Indiana Jones franchise walks us back a year prior to the events in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Indy, played again by Harrison Ford, narrowly escaping a triad hit in a Shanghai nightclub with a beautiful, but spoiled, club singer named Willie Scott (relative newcomer at the time, the lovely Kate Capshaw), and a 12-year-old Chinese pickpocket named Short Round, played by future Academy Award-winner Ke Huy Quan.

When the plane they escape in becomes part of the triad’s second hit attempt, Indy and his new friends crash-land in the village of Mayapore deep in India, where they learn that the small farming community has been decimated by an evil cult that stole a sacred stone (one of five) said to have the power to bring prosperity and healthy harvests. True to its legend, the stone’s absence dries up the water supply and kills the crops, leaving the small tribe desperate and hungry. To add a brutal insult to injury, the cult has also kidnapped the children of the village to use as slave labor to mine the subterranean caves beneath Pankot Palace for the other stones.

Seeing no other choice but to travel to the Palace to retrieve the stone and save the children (not to mention investigate the rumor that the cult responsible for the theft and kidnapping, the Thuggee, still exists, as they were said to have been eradicated by the British Army so long ago that they’ve become the stuff of nightmarish myth), the trio discover that not only is everything they’ve been told horrifically true, but that the cult is still very much active and performing grisly human sacrifices led by the sinister high priest Mola Ram (played by a truly frightening Amrish Puri).

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, like Raiders of the Lost Ark before it, is a white-knuckle thrill ride that blasts us through jungles, temples, caverns, mine shafts, Himalayan mountains, Shanghai back alleys, and rope bridges at high velocity. The high-octane action of it all is unquestionable. Temple of Doom is an Indiana Jones adventure through and through. But Temple of Doom also brings with it a nasty mean streak that the original film didn’t have, setting it apart from its elder in a big, bad way.

Rumor has it that executive producer George Lucas had just gotten (or was in the process of getting) a divorce and was feeling understandably salty during this period. By many accounts, his depressive state led to the idea that Temple of Doom should be a darker, meaner film than its predecessor.

This must have been one hell of a divorce, because a series of consecutive sequences taking up a good quarter of the film’s runtime is dedicated to a barrage of audio/visual horrors so aggressive that it (along with the slimy frights of Joe Dante’s Gremlins that same summer) directly led to the creation of the MPAA PG-13 rating. Families sitting in the theater that weekend expecting another edge-of-your-seat serial-style adventure were treated to it, but they were going to pay for it first. It begins with a terrifying occult ceremony in front of a towering stone effigy of the skull-faced demon Kali, adorned with skulls, fresh blood, and severed arms. A peasant is sacrificed by being shackled to a steel stretcher and lowered into a pit of lava after his still-beating heart is ripped from his chest like a Mortal Kombat fatality move, which ignites in Mola Ram’s hand as the screaming man is incinerated.

Jones, along with Willie and Short Round, are captured by the Thuggee cult, where they witness hundreds of children being forced to mine for the missing stones, many of whom are being brutally beaten or flogged for their exhaustion. The soundtrack is populated with whip cracks and the tortured screams of kids. This trilogy of terror is finalized with Indy and Short Round being flogged by Thuggee henchmen and tortured by voodoo before Indy is possessed by the evil spirit of Kali after being forced to drink blood from the mouth of a rotting, severed head. Only after Indy snaps out of his possession does Temple of Doom turn into the nonstop actioner audiences expected, with exciting fistfights on stone-crushing conveyor belts, a high-speed mine-car chase, and a final showdown on a rope bridge high above an alligator-infested river. Even John Williams’ score rouses back up during this latter quarter of the film, almost as if to say, “Hey…the scary part is over, let’s have fun again.”

As good a film as Temple of Doom is, it’s still an inferior sequel (or prequel, rather) that sidelines a lot of what made the original such a magical, genre-transcending experience. It’s largely mean-spirited for a generous portion of its runtime and substitutes the first film’s sly sense of humor with a useless gross-out dinner sequence that culminates in a Faces of Death-inspired dessert. It also trades the plucky, two-fisted love interest in Karen Allen’s Marion Ravenwood for an admittedly beautiful, but ultimately vapid, nag in Capshaw’s Willie Scott, a character that spends the entirety of the movie screaming, whining, and being of little use shy of eye candy. Even Capshaw, in a Spielberg biography, admitted she was relegated to “not much more than a dumb, screaming blonde,” when the previous film went to great lengths to prove Allen’s character a formidable match to Indy’s bravery and fighting spirit. That said, a sequence in the jungle of Willie running from one end of the campsite to the other, screaming at every creepy crawly that surrounds them while Indy and Short Round calmly play poker in the background, is one of the funniest bits of the entire Indiana Jones series.

Despite its shortcomings and the rather negative (but justified) retrospective opinions from Spielberg, Capshaw, and others (namely Raiders scribe Lawrence Kasdan, who rejected the job essentially for all the reasons cited above), Temple of Doom is still a damn fun movie. Yeah, it’s gritty, it’s mean, it’s even pretty terrifying at times, but its heart is still purely Indiana Jones, and that’s something not even the evil power of Kali can rip from its chest.

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Like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom was a rousing success both in theaters and on home video and has enjoyed a long and healthy life in every format. But the most comprehensive release would have to be the 2012 Blu-ray set Indiana Jones: The Complete Adventures, which features the first four films and a whole bonus disc of special features. Temple of Doom is the second disc in the package and features only two bonus items:

• Teaser Trailer
• Theatrical Trailer

The lion’s share of Temple of Doom’s bonus features (as well as the other films’ features) are on the fifth disc in the set, which features:

• The Making of Temple of Doom
• The Stunts of Indiana Jones
• The Sound of Indiana Jones
• The Music of Indiana Jones
• The Light and Magic of Indiana Jones
• Indiana Jones and the Creepy Crawlies
• Travel with Indiana Jones: Locations
• Indy’s Women: The American Film Institute Tribute
• Indy’s Friends and Enemies

And this doesn’t include the bonus features specific to each Indiana Jones film in the box. It’s a wonderful set with hours of fun material to comb through.

BITS ‘N’ PIECES

Traum-A-Meter:

 3 out of 4.

It may not be a gory film, but it’s certainly frightening and deals in some dark material. Much of that third quarter of the movie is dedicated to disturbing imagery, horrifying occult practices, and children in deep peril. It’s the darkest of the series by far.

Today’s Jam: Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper crooned from the top of the charts while Indiana whip-cracked his way through the Temple of Doom that weekend in 1984.

THIS EPISODE’S MORAL:

If you’re headed to Pankot Palace, maybe stop for lunch and bring something with you for dinner.