I remember watching the Legends of the Hidden Temple TV show when I was a kid. If you don’t know what that is, that just reminds me that I’m an old on the internet. Anyway, it was a adventure game show on Nickelodeon back in the 1990’s where teams of kids would attempt challenges, and if successful they would enter the Hidden Temple and try to get an artifact out before the hidden guards would pop out, scare the shit out of them (and probably a good number of kids watching), and end their run. And because nothing is sacred, in 2016 it was brought back as a made for TV movie. Apparently the first game show to be turned into a movie! That’s certainly… something.
We follow three siblings–one of whom casually drops early on that he can speak “millipede, monkey, and a little mouse” and there is NO explanation why or how–who get stuck in the titular Hidden Temple because one of them is an overeager little shit. They run into Olmec, a giant stone head that explains how to escape: get both halves of a magic amulet and try not to die. They encounter dangerous rooms, weirdly colored animals that are related to the teams from the 90’s, an apparently impossible to solve monkey statue puzzle, and Olmec’s evil son. In the end the amulet is reunited, the temple is unlocked, the kids are safe, and Olmec’s not-evil son becomes king. And they all live happily ever after! Except for the evil son, as he was most likely eaten by a red jaguar.
For a movie only slightly longer than an hour, this dragged on so much. Who was this for, exactly? Not someone my age who watched the show when we were kids. It’s filled with enough references to the old show that kids born after it ended wouldn’t–
–wait a minute. There are people born after the show went off the air who are in their mid-twenties right now. That is technically a legal adult. Excuse me while I blow away, as I am so old I have turned to dust. That’s it; there’s no other outro. Get off my lawn you damn whippersnappers.
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