House of the Tiger King

I think some of the best documentaries are those that make you ask yourself if the whole thing is a put-on. Here we have a fearless explorer who hates the jungles and is too inept to consult archaeological lore or maps or weather patterns. We have a film crew which bogs down the Long March with vast amounts of filming gear. We have a succession of guides (the gonzo Col. Kilgore wannabee who has surveyed the terrain on hallucinogenic over-flights, the aged man drunk on metaphysics, and the Indian who craves urban life) whose information is always false (sometimes outrageously). It is a recipe for disaster, a quixotic trip into the heart of darkness which unglues every mind and every alliance. The serial foolishness of the explorer is also our narration. His tapes bounce manically from loving to hating members of the team, from delusional optimism to crushing defeatism, and from unwarranted certainty to paranoid skepticism--sometimes within the space of a few sentences. The Film Crew sometimes creates tangents intended to make a better film. Everyone suffers from a sort of monomanic blindness that prevents them from absorbing the sheer folly of the overarching enterprise. Along the way, the minutiae and the obstacles are just too weird to be believed.

A documentary? Or fiction? You choose. Ostensibly, it is a documentary about explorer Tahir Shah. The young explorer (who looks like Dave Attell from Comedy Central's "Insomniac") has discovered a number of abandoned cities, ancient temples and lost tombs around the world. Now he heads for Peru to find "The House of the Tiger King," a lost Incan city of gold. Along the way, he hires a lying guide named Pancho, lazy porters, a bunch of argumentative white explorers to help him out, and more.

You being to suspect this is all fake; no one would be so inept! Except that this is real. They really do go into the bush, climb mountains, lose their food, get off track, and get bitten by snakes and piranhas and alligators. Monkeys do "do their business" on their heads.

Part black comedy, part documentary, part history film. Shah is such a verbose, prolix-prose type that you can't help but think he's a idiot. When will we find out it's all a joke? Only, it's not. And then they begin to find a stone road...

In truth, this is how expeditions really turn out. Inter-cultural miscommunication is common. Problems with porters do happen, often. Local myth and superstition do play big roles in communication, location and exploration. It's not "Indiana Jones," this is real life. The film is rather trying at times, because the explorers seem to be so obnoxious. But the camera work and editing are terrific, and the film manages to bring out some intriguing and subtle truths about the way the world works.