As World War II comes to a close, three Japanese soldiers — aka the losing side — hide a bunch of gold in a cave in the Philippines. Thirty-six years later — round numbers, phooey! — some honkies go a-hunting for it, in an expedition so dangerous, one of them remarks, “I knew this was going to be difficult.”
Viewers of this truly terrible film, Invaders of the Lost Gold, no doubt will agree at the outset.
Staying in what appear to be tents purloined from a traveling circus and/or an annual Renaissance fair, the members of this Horror Safari (the movie’s alternate, better, yet still deceitful title) include:
• the presumed leader (Stuart Whitman, Guyana: Cult of the Damned), eternally grouchy and quick to call someone a “bastard”;
• his former partner (Edmund Purdom, Don’t Open Till Christmas), now a cut-and-dry conniving villain;
• in his final film role, Harold Sakata (Goldfinger’s Oddjob) as the sole surviving point of the aforementioned Japanese triangle, thereby making him the only person who knows where the loot is, thereby making that Lost Gold portion of the title entirely irrelevant;
• the safari funder’s “confounding daughter” (Glynis Barber, Edge of Sanity), because every he-man needs a love interest, even in a movie bereft of affection;
• a second woman (Black Emanuelle herself, Laura Gemser), because every Z-grade adventure needs an actress willing to provide nudity;
• and poor Woody Strode (Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead), Invaders’ only African-American not part of the demeaning ooga-booga tribes.
Strode has so little to do (which may have been for the best) that all I remember his character doing is scratching his head. I’m sure it had to do with the jungle heat, but one can’t help but think the man’s mind was processing some cosmic question like, “How in the hell did I go from John Ford and Stanley Kubrick … to this?”
By “this,” we mean the work of Killer’s Moon director Alan Birkinshaw, working from a screenplay he co-wrote, from a story dreamt up by his producer, exploitation legend Dick Randall (Pieces). While I admire a great deal of Randall’s vast filmography, Invaders of the Lost Gold is the rare entry that doesn’t cut it. Ostensibly a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style adventure of Eastern Hemisphere exploits, the flick cuts its own throat — with a dull machete, fittingly — by being excessively lazy and shoddy, even by Randall’s low standards.
Merely one example: One unnamed character unclothes to starkers — oh, did I just give her identity away? — and takes a dip in the river, only to scream in mortal terror at … well, something. She’s dead, Jim — yet we never find out how or why! That’s just how Birkinshaw rolls: with patches of mold. —Rod Lott