Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom: The Dark Horror Film

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom takes place a year before Raiders, and it has a much darker tone than its predecessor. The story starts in China, but almost immediately takes Indy to India, where he spends the rest of the film (this is the first indicator that Temple is different from Raiders and Last Crusade; a central location replaces the globe-trotting adventure). In India, Jones and his travel companions (a young Chinese boy named Short Round and an American songstress named Willie) discover a village devoid of crops, water, and even children. The village elder tells Indy that an ancient and sadistic cult has stolen a magic stone that provided good luck and kidnapped all the children. Jones and company travel to an ancient palace that was once home to the cult, where they discover that the cult has reformed and is using the children as a work force to find the rest of the magic stones.

There are scary scenes in each film (some are scarier to different people; for example, the scene in the snake pit in Lost Ark gets to some people, while the bug scene in Temple affects others), but I think that most fans would argue that this movie has the most disturbing images in the series. Most notable is the scene where Mola Ram, the cult leader, rips a man's beating heart of his chest and throws the still-living man into a fire pit. George Lucas claims that his then-turbulent personal life was a definite influence on the darkness of this film, which is the official horror film of the trilogy. In fact, this film was responsible for the PG-13 rating. After a few other recent films that straddled the line between PG and R, Steven Spielberg asked the MPAA to create a new rating for movies like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which had enough violence/sex/profanity (violence in this case) to be too traumatic for kids, but not worthy of an R-rating, which hurts box office receipts (in theory) by disallowing teenagers from seeing the film without a parent (in theory).

Of the three films, this one is my least favorite, but I still enjoy it; I think that this mentality is shared by most Indiana Jones fans (I could be wrong, but most people I talk to about these films list this as their least favorite). There are some aspects that get a little tiresome, mainly Shorty and Willie. Shorty starts off funny as the strange kid sidekick (it looks like Indy will have another young sidekick in the upcoming film, which makes me a little nervous), then becomes grating. By the end, he is not that bad (and has one of the best lines in the movie). Willie is the exact opposite of Marion; she is a high-maintenance girlie girl who screams and recoils after breaking a fingernail (meanwhile, Indy and Shorty are about to be killed by a booby trap, and the nail was broken attempting to activate the failsafe lever). In one sense, it is interesting to see how a non-adventurer would react to Indy's exploits, but her constant screaming becomes an annoyance.

The movie is famous not only for its somewhat annoying supporting characters, but also has some very memorable and oft-referenced (I'm looking at you, Family Guy) sequences. The aforementioned scene with the cult leader often precedes the movie; when new viewers come into the Jones series, there are two scenes that inspire fear before the first minute has even passed. One is the snake pit scene, and the other is the heart-ripping scene. I myself avoided these films for years because of those two sequences. Then of course, there is the famous mine car chase, which is an incredible sequence through the bowels of the temple.

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