Review by Irving Wardle, The Times, 11 August 1976.

After Jerome Savery’s anti-colonial Zartan spectaculars, Tarzan hardly ranks as a virgin candidate for satire, and Richard O’Brien and Richard Hartley have no difficulty in repeating the violation in this sequel to The Rocky Horror Show.

T Zee is another English exercise in West Coat American camp, ostensibly ridiculing something that was a joke to start with; and as before, it shows a pair of straights falling captives to freakland. This time they are two respectable anthropologists inspecting the future deserts of Los Angeles for any surviving traces of life: enter Tarzan on his rope, followed by a horde of ghouls through trapdoors, who escort them to the underworld kingdom of what used to be Sunset Strip, ruled by the pop star sadist Bone Idol and his insatiable consort Princess La.

As you may surmise, all this is garishly staged, with Mr Hartley and his men pumping out rock and country music up above, while down below the captives are incarcerated in an ultimate amusement arcade by Brian Thomson, fairy lights flashing over the WIN and LOSE doors, with 16-ton weights manacled to their wrists,

At which point one begins to see why the authors picked on Tarzan in the first place.

Bone Idol’s underworld is a place hatched from Hollywood myth and totally divorced from nature. Its attendant ghouls are former show business lawyers, extras and television personalities, and although the place is run on sex fantasy only deviation is permissable. Anything approaching staraightforward sex is put down as lacking in style. Women are one target. At one point, the court enjoys a gang-bang with a pile of inflatable rubber dolls. And when the fleshy Princess La (another high-powered performance by the brazen-lunged Diane Langton) dons her heart-shaped shades for the leopard-skinned captives and leads them into her bower of bliss, that brings her reign as the Sunset Strip Turandot to an abrupt end.

In the midst of the sadism, fetishistic costume, the cool narcissism and grotesque glamour, Tarzan remains a figure still attached to nature; all he wants is to find Jane and get back up the tree. And for that reason he is made ridiculous. Warren Clark, a beefy figure in the jungle equivalent of a one-piece bathing suit, plays him as an incorruptible booby with a wide country-boy grin, and blockish self-confidence in his homespun merits. To be true, the plot is on his side; he knocks out Arthur Dignam’s ringmaster Lucifer in a street duel and even gets Jane.

But he never makes it as a member of the club.

The show, in short, is fueled by homosexual arrogance which keeps it moving even when everything else runs out. An angel descends to offer Tarzan a big welcome up above; apart from the fact that he is played by a boy in a wig with a Northern accent, there is no joke. The whole book is written in doggerel couplets, a gain for no apparent reason beyond ridiculing something as innocent as Tarzan.

Equipped with Paul Nicholas’ Satanically sexy Bone Idol and an appearance by Mr O’Brien as the masochistic anthropologist, the show like its forerunner may acquire a cult following. But the joke is wearing thin.