This movie is an Orientalist phantasmagoria, a collection of horrifying images that symbolize the terrible East: “Siamese architecture and boats in a lagoon [with] shots of a turbaned man leading an elephant,” “a mansion with Mediterranean, Spanish colonial, and California motifs,” a “monkey and a Thai doll against a backdrop of leopard skin draped on a wall,” the “throne of the Siamese prince and princess [with] two women wearing Egyptian costumes,” and “scenes of Buddhist priests with shaven heads preparing to sacrifice a lamb. . . with shots of teeming alligators below.” The fact that Buddhists are shown sacrificing lambs expresses the film’s Orientalist contours. The lamb is a well-known symbol of Christ, and Buddhists are vegetarians. None of this matters, for Orientalism often focuses less on details and more on exoticism.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 599