I am keeping this at five star for one reason: Grace Jones. without her participation, it would have been significantly worse.
I wrote A review of this shortly after it was released on DVD in the US. That review has magically disappeared. It was one of the first reviews I ever wrote for IMDb.
Grace Jones was wonderful, she looked wonderful, but her appearance in this was simply a sad waste. I think she was maybe stuck into this as eyecandy just like David Hasselhoff was- they even made her character look similar to the character "Zula" from "Conan the Destroyer".
Somebody else claimed that they considered this miniseries racist, I don't see anything "racist" about this, not really. It's just bad storytelling. Maybe there was an idea here that people would have been interested in seeing after all these years after Shaka Zulu. But that idea was mucked up.
For the rest of it, I couldn't understand the story whatsoever, of course I know now that the DVD that I rented back in 2005 or so was woefully incomplete and there was much more of a story than what I was allowed to see. So now that I know this information I will try to find the full miniseries and maybe that will fill in the blanks that the version that I saw left.
Had I had access to the full miniseries, I may have enjoyed whatever story was there. But this truncated DVD version distributed by Blockbuster Video, it never should have been released in the US. I rented this back in the day because I saw the words "Shaka Zulu" on the cover, as well as Grace Jones. Those two items made me grab it in my weekly rentals at the time. But I was immensely disappointed, the amount of my disappointment in this is equal to the amount of enjoyment I felt watching the original.
I agree with most of the other people who have commented, this does not deserve to even be associated with the original Shaka Zulu.
Also, in response to the comments written by one of the people involved in this production, why fictionalize something just to create a new, inadequate story, when the original story and the actual truth of history would have been sufficient when making any continuation?
Just tell the original story, mine the history books. And don't just grab actors that don't quite fit. Grace Jones of course was the right actress, but the part that they gave her was disappointing. This could've been so much better. So much better.
What really bothered me about this was that in the middle of the film, all of a sudden David Hasselhoff magically appears (sans his Baywatch entourage)... and then there is some gobbledygook about a fire and a shipwreck which doesn't look like a shipwreck at all.
If you are going to sink a ship in a story (and burn it), then sink it and burn it. It is the filmmakers job to make us believe it regardless of how it was done. This is why you build props and sometimes you even build miniatures in case you do not wish to destroy any full-size ships. Which appears to be what happened here, the story involves the sinking and destruction of a ship but they didn't want to do it for real and that made the whole thing completely unbelievable. Imagine, "Pirates of the Caribbean" being been made the same year without any ships blowing up and sinking. And the scene appears to have been inserted into the film just to show how heroic David Hasselhoff is. An honorable thing to do, to be sure, but it was kind of ludicrous to just have this dropped into the middle of the story. But the whole thing about a fire on a ship, I wasn't convinced. And then Karen Allen, although I like her very much, where was Indiana Jones?
My original review expressed my disappointment with this in a much better way.
I don't like writing negative reviews, I gave this five stars because although I didn't like it, I respect the work that was done. I have edited this a few times to clarify my points.
