The Ghost And The Darkness Details

Screenwriter William Goldman developed this true colonial yarn of man versus near-mythical beast and writes candidly about its shortcomings in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?. He wanted to tell the tale of the man-eating Tsavo lions that terrorised the building of a railway in East Africa in the late 1800s, but producer Michael Douglas pulled rank and decided he would also star as the enigmatic big game hunter who assists Val Kilmer's engineer. Douglas and Kilmer did not hit it off on a stressful location shoot, and since their relationship is central to the story (the vicious lions are barely seen, even at the climax), it fails to convince on any level. There's majestic scenery, but nothing to get your teeth into in the foreground except ham.

The British Empire's steaming progress across East Africa is stalled by two lions that wreak such terror on the natives... read more on Time Out