Narration in the 1965-set River of Death suggests that director Steve Carver (Big Bad Mama) may have viewed this adaptation of the 1981 Alistair MacLean novel as his own Apocalypse Now. Of course, Michael Dudikoff is no Martin Sheen; the American Ninja star has trouble delivering the VO convincingly, stumbling and rolling over the words awkwardly, the way some people tussle with strands of pizza cheese that just won’t break. The more he tries, the goofier he comes off.
Produced by Harry Alan Towers (reuniting with Dudikoff after 1988’s Platoon Leader), the Cannon Films cheapie takes place 500 miles from civilization, deep in the Amazon jungle, where adventurer John Hamilton (Dudikoff) leads a doctor (Victor Melleney, 1989’s Hellgate) and the doctor’s sexy-enough daughter (Sarah Maur Thorp, Edge of Sanity) to a lost city, in hopes of finding the rumored antidote to the disease that’s been eating away the brains of various tribesmen and tribeswomen — an equal-opportunity contagion.
How Hamilton knows the location — or even the general whereabouts — of this supposed “lost” city is not worth wondering about. For starters, the doc is killed almost immediately after being introduced. Eventually, the real story reveals itself, in the form of Third Reich member Dr. Wolfgang Manteuffel (Robert Vaughn, Superman III), who conducts the kind of Nazi experiments adorning many a pulp-mag cover as if Hitler never died, and his in-cahoots benefactor, Heinrich Spaatz (Donald Pleasence, Prince of Darkness). Somewhere in between this sequence of events? Midget boxing.
A mess of a movie, River of Death in no way approaches the built-in excitement of its title. At best, it’s a middling jungle picture that checks off the boxes: sacred temple, ooga-booga tribes, cannibalism, boredom … —Rod Lott