Even when I saw it new, I was bothered by the inclusion of not one, but two of the most annoying type of sidekick characters: the fancy city girl who can't stop screaming, and the sassy little kid. But I thought I remembered it being pretty good when the kid wasn't saying anything and the girl wasn't screaming. Nuh. It's actually pretty terrible most of the time, except for the opening "Anything Goes" musical number. The humorous scenes play out like a sitcom, and the main villain is so over the top he fails to seem scary. He's more like a villain from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The action setpieces just seem fake, as if we're taking a ride on the Disneyland Indiana Jones-themed attraction, rather than watching a movie.

I distinctly remember that the big horror sacrifice scene in some kind of underground... uh... volcano? worked for me when I was a teenager, but it didn't work for me now. I thought it was stupid, ill-conceived, unconvincing, and actually, you know, kinda racist.

However, it does feature Evil Shirtless Indy, which may be what carried the whole film for me when I was a teenager, I dunno.

Evil Shirtless Indy is evil because he has been dosed with the "blood of Kali Ma" which causes something called the "black sleep of Kali" which looks an awful lot like classic voodoo zombieism. For some reason it bugged me that they had mixed up their cultural traditions like that, and had what were supposedly Thuggees turning people into zombies and not strangling them. Although I do like the way ESI just sits up and starts laughing insanely when the potion starts to work.

Why he's shirtless, I'm less clear about. Maybe because it's, you know, hot in that big volcanic cavern.

(Do they even have that kind of volcano in India? Seriously, do they have that kind of volcano anywhere? Where there's a big underground cavern and a bubbling lava pit you can throw people into? I mean, I know they have one in Mordor, but that's a made-up land.)

Anyway, I realized that I was witness to -- victim of, if you will -- the very phenomenon that causes the young and inexperienced to slobber over movies that actual reviewers aren't too impressed by (and then get all high and mighty with the reviewers over their difference of opinion). Something that didn't bug me when I was younger, knew less, and had seen fewer movies, bugs me now. Something that didn't seem stupid twenty-plus years ago, seems stupid now.