As an opening title card informs us, René Cardona Jr.’s Treasure of the Amazon takes place in 1958 South America … yet the follow-up card states that the site of the story we are about to see is a “fictitious place.”

Okay, sooooo not in South America? Not along the Amazon? To what water-based landmark does this supposed Treasure belong? Help me out here, René!

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Cardona and co-writer Jacques Wilson soon distract you from those nagging questions by piling on undeveloped characters and storylines they won’t fully see through. Treasure of the Amazon is one of many old-school, serial-inspired adventure films that arose in Raiders of the Lost Ark’s whip crack of a wake. You want lucidity and motivation? Stick to Spielberg. You want the introduction to our hero be him purposely slicing off another character’s finger for reasons never fully explained? Cardona’s your hombre.

That “hero” is Gringo, played by Stuart Whitman, whose barking delivery is set at maximum-Nolte and whose Invaders of the Lost Gold from 1982 also falls into the Indy-wannabe sweepstakes. Grizzled, bloated and forever sweaty, Gringo is making his second sojourn into the jungle to hunt for diamonds, after the first try some years before resulted in all his pals ending up as shrunken heads. Also looking for these gems is … well, everyone, but among the notable are a tight-shorted adventurer named Dick, who looks like George Michael on safari (Clark Jarrett, Hot Moves); a Nazi anxious for a Third Reich revival (Donald Pleasence, who would play a Hitler acolyte again in 1989’s River of Death); and two beautiful women, one of whom goes the whole movie without a top (Sonia Infante, Cardona’s Beaks: The Movie) and the other of whom goes without nostrils (Ann Sidney, Performance).

Treasure is so underwritten, it somehow appears complex — meaning, if you whiteboarded all the disparate narrative threads that pop up, you’d end up with a bunch of straight lines running parallel, from left to right. This is the kind of action flick that’s all about the points along those lines — the points at which alligators eat the expendable slaves, at which white people are felled by poisoned blow darts, at which a man is ripped apart by crabs (the film’s highlight, as if guest-directed by Lucio Fulci). It’s a fungal jungle of spiders and snakes and natives who look like they just came from a paint party. —Rod Lott

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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

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Killer Force is a slightly off-kilter heist picture, primarily because of its setting: the middle of a South African desert, with nothing but sand dunes for miles around all sides of the Syndicated Diamond Corporation. Some precious, uncut stones worth $20 million are targeted for thievin’ by a gang of criminals, and they need an inside man to help pull it off. Perhaps even one sleeping with a co-worker’s daughter (Octopussy herself, Maud Adams, never sexier).

That man is Bradley (Peter Fonda, Ghost Rider), SDC’s second-in-command of security. The wisenheimer works under the tyrannical rule of Webb (a truly menacing Telly Savalas, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), who’s such a jerk that it makes Bradley’s decision to aid the dark side that much easier. Whereas director and co-writer Val Guest (The Quatermass Xperiment) depicts that allegiance swing too quickly, it does keep Killer Force moving along — well and consistently, until the mano y mano finale.

I’m uncertain if the title refers to Webb’s bullying, under-my-thumb employment tactics or the dirty quarter-dozen of heist hatchers. It’s led by Simon Cowell look-alike Hugh O’Brian (1965’s Ten Little Indians), clad in manly neckerchief. His mercenary underlings are more notable, in that they’re played by Hammer legend Christopher Lee and double murderer O.J. Simpson. The latter can’t act, but damn, the dude can run! And, a terrific Fonda hero aside, that foot Juice is really all something as compact as this dynamite AIP release needs. —Rod Lott

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Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Nay, they should not. After all, it’s tough to rid your mind of people once you’ve witnessed them plummet to their deaths when a luxury ocean liner goes topsy-turvy. Such a fate befalls the revelers ushering in the New Year aboard a top-heavy ship heading from New York to Athens. If it’s not a party until something gets broken, then holy shit, is The Poseidon Adventure ever a blowout!

Shortly after the stroke of midnight, while the adults are still sloshed enough to wear stupid paper hats, a seaquake triggers a giant wave that flips that ship belly-up! Nature’s cruelty personified, the 180˚ turn transforms the opulent ballroom into a collection of broken glass and dead flesh as the passengers are hurled from floor to ceiling. So harsh is the force that Stella Stevens hardly can keep her breasts contained within her gown. And anyone who’s seen her flaunt the goods in films as disparate as The Silencers and Slaughter knows that’s no easy feat. Here, the stacked starlet plays a former hooker now married to the blustery cop who busted her (Ernest Borgnine, 1979’s The Black Hole).

Both are among a handful of survivors who reluctantly follow a faith-challenged man of the cloth (Gene Hackman, The French Connection) up and through a veritable obstacle course to the hull of the upturned Poseidon, in hopes of escape before the boat sinks to join Davy Jones’ locker on the ocean floor. Others on the unscheduled field trip include a one-time swim champion, now overweight (Shelley Winters, The Night of the Hunter); a confirmed bachelor with ginger hair (Red Buttons, When Time Ran Out …); and the groovy lead singer (Carol Lynley of Radley Metzger’s The Cat and the Canary) of the hippie band that plays “The Morning After,” one of the more wretched pop tunes to win the Best Song Oscar. In a story that boldly plays for keeps, not all of them live to see fresh air.

Something of a pet project for producer Irwin Allen (who followed with The Towering Inferno), this adaptation of Paul Gallico’s 1969 novel ditched the rape subplot and, with Ronald Neame (Meteor) at the helm, became a massive hit, kicking off a disaster-movie craze that helped define the decade and kept the Allen household well-fed. Today, The Poseidon Adventure and its brethren get knocked about as witless exercises in largesse — and sure, some are, like the 2006 remake — but, being the granddaddy, this one chooses sobriety over silliness, proving particularly strong in suspense, performances (especially Hackman, giving it his usual all) and special effects. Post-Love Boat, the all-star, kitchen-sink cast began looking unnecessarily bloated, but dammit, that flip-flop sequence has aged wonderfully. —Rod Lott

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Literally the last action film of the ’80s, the Guber-Peters Company buddy copper Tango & Cash seemingly rounds up every element that defined the genre that decade, and packed them into the first 10 minutes. To wit: Renegade cops! Guns! Car chases! Cocaine! Tits! Mullets! Mullets!! Mullets!!! Complete and total disregard for life, limb and property! Russian comic relief! The snyth-pop music of Fletch’s Harold Faltermeyer! The scary-potato face of Maniac Cop Robert Z’Dar!

Okay, so I lied. All that can be found in the first nine minutes. Only upon closer scrutiny do we notice the absence of two things: running/jumping from an explosion and a slice of beefcake via a hunk’s bare buns. Rest assured, both “rear” their heads before director Andrei Konchalovsky (Runaway Train) ends the film — in a freeze-frame of a high-five, natch.

Respectively coming off Lock Up and Tequila Sunrise, Stallone and Russell respectively play rival cops Lt. Raymond Tango and Lt. Gabriel Cash, respectively buttoned-up and a loose cannon. Both winners in the war on drugs — or at least as far as their L.A. beats are concerned — the men are framed for murder by rat-loving criminal kingpin Yves Perret (Jack Palance, playing his character as if he were still in Tim Burton’s Batman), simply to move the story forward and give Tango and Cash something to do — namely, go to prison, simply so Tango and Cash can break out of prison. You get the picture; its idea of audience-pleasing comedy is dressing Russell in drag and having Stallone declare that “Rambo is a pussy.” Ha, get it?

At once as familiar and embarrassing as a lunch of SpaghettiOs, Tango & Cash does sport a couple of surprises, the first being that our heroes are like James Bond in that they have their own Q, as savant-as-ever Michael J. Pollard (Bonnie and Clyde) constructs such useful gadgets as the guns that pop out of Cash’s cowboy boot heels. Speaking of 007, future Bond girl Teri Hatcher (Tomorrow Never Dies), in an early role as Tango’s troubled kid sister, Kiki, proves to have quite the impressive stripper moves. She also may be the screen’s only clothes-peeler to a perform a drum solo in the middle of her routine. Well-played, Ms. Hatcher, well-played.

Kiki’s rhyming throwaway comment of “grime, crime and slime” nearly could be Tango & Cash’s plot synopsis, but definitely works as a tagline for this high-calorie high colonic of a movie. Same goes for Tango’s utterance of “good old American action,” because no one makes mindless violence as the USA. USA! USA! USA! US — whaddaya mean Konchalovsky was born in Moscow? No wonder this production was so troubled. —Rod Lott

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