Imagine if Jean-Claude Van Damme made Bloodsport and then never got to topline another action film. You’ve just envisioned a sad world, I know, and yet that is the reality for world-champion boxer Carlos Palomino and his Fists of Steel. Having essayed the roles of Truck Driver, First Cuban and Bandit #1 in, respectively, Silent Night, Deadly Night III; It’s Alive III and Dance of the Dwarfs, the welterweight champ earned his shot at action-hero glory in the Stallone/Schwarzenegger era.

Written, produced and directed by Jerry Schafer (whose only other credit is 1970’s obscure hippie drama, Like It Is), the film plays directly to its hopeful star’s strengths, in that he plays a guy named Carlos. From a logo that belongs on a locker mirror won at the state fair to a theme song rivaling “You Got the Touch” in the department of he-men ballads, everything about Fists of Steel screams the 1980s. Although the indie was released in 1991, I suspect its delay represents a case of shelf-sitting while awaiting a buyer, because a portrait of President Ronald Reagan smiles from the wood-paneled wall of the single room serving as CIA headquarters.

The CIA needs an agent “outside the government” to bring down Shogi (Henry Silva, Above the Law), “an expert in three areas of terrorism: killing, kidnapping and ambush.” In fact, Shogi — who theme-dresses like a baseball player and a dentist when torturing victims — ordered the death of Carlos’ father via truck running over his head, thus making a revenge-salivating Carlos the agency’s ideal recruit.

The only problem is that Shogi is known to be in Hawaii, says Agent George (Sam Melville, Twice Dead), which may be problematic for Carlos in source utilization. Carlos asks George if Hawaii has any Mexican restaurants, to which George responds in the affirmative.

“Then I have sources,” says Carlos, a Vietnam vet who is capital-D down for undertaking the mission, and under the code name of Conquistador at that: “He’s gonna die slow. And mean. And hard.”

But shit won’t be easy; Shogi has a secret weapon in the hourglass form of a KGB honey (Marianne Marks, Russ Meyer’s Up!) whose Russian accent is so brick-thick, you half-anticipate hearing the phrase “moose and squirrel” emerge from her ruby-red mouth. Also working their way into the plot: an itching henchman named Itchy, a butt-ugly lounge singer, a round of bikini croquet and two twists I dare not spoil, even if the first is as obvious as Carlos’ mustache is bountiful.

The way Fists of Steel ends (read: abruptly, bordering on accidentally) leaves as many questions unanswered as it does near-split ribs from prolonged laughter. Although a talented fighter, Palomino is no actor — not that lack of thespian skills ever stopped Van Damme — and there would be no further adventures of Conquistador. But I would gladly pay to see them. —Rod Lott

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John S. Rad’s Dangerous Men does not tell a story in any conventional manner — not because its Iran-born multihyphenate creator had an innovative narrative approach he was itching to impart, but because he did not know how to tell a story. At least his trash can be branded as one-of-a-kind trash. To see it is to disbelieve it, and that should count for something.

When her fiancé (one-timer Coti Cook) is murdered by her would-be rapist on a public beach in broad daylight, Mina (one-timer Melody Wiggins) dries her tears and immediately befriends the evil deed-doer. Mira’s intention is to get this fat, bald biker named Tiger (one-timer George Derby) alone in a hotel room, which she does only after they share a pre-sex steak dinner. Naked, she insists he rub her knees as he kisses her belly button, and as Tiger complies in ecstasy, she retrieves the fenced steak knife hidden between her butt cheeks and stabs him to death. Move over, Ms. 45! Vengeance, thy name is Mina!

From there, Mina vows to kill — and perhaps even castrate — any male who dare use and abuse a woman. To do this most effectively, she dons the disguise of your common street whore. It’s as if we are witnessing the origin of a feminist vigilante superhero … except that Mina just kinda disappears from Dangerous Men, so the movie morphs into something else — that being the tale of a police detective who would have become Mina’s brother-in-law (Michael Gradilone, Animal Instincts III) out to crack down on a drug-dealing biker gang whose leader is a poodle-mulleted Caucasian named Black Pepper (Bryan Jenkins, 1997’s Riot). Mr. Pepper earns an interminable, Tommy Wiseau-length sex scene with a skank after their strange idea of foreplay: hiring a belly dancer (Roohi — just Roohi, thanks) to perform her hip-shimmying routine while they watch from the living room couch.

It ends with … well, you’ll have to witness this baffler for yourself. Even among all the cinematic detritus I’ve consumed in four decades’ time, I cannot recall a single one wrapping up quite like this!

Rad’s coda should not have caught me so off-guard. It’s not like my eyes didn’t notice the cop’s badge reading “Policeman Police” earlier. It’s also not as if Rad’s own looped-synth score didn’t register with my ears throughout, its plucky mix of Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” and the Seinfeld theme incongruent with the tragedy unfolding onscreen. Dangerous Men is consistent only in that it is woefully incompetent for every second. The conclusion is par for the course, considering Rad’s course clocked roughly 20 years from idea to premiere. The wait was worth it, even if none of us knew we were waiting. Again, that should count for something. Shouldn’t it? —Rod Lott

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A sequel to Liane, Jungle Goddess from one year earlier, Nature Girl and the Slaver presents — with a generous use of seashells — the continuing adventures of its cut-rate female Tarzan. Played by Marion Michael, the white-skinned, blonde-haired Liane — or Diane, as the English dub of this German/Italian co-production calls her — lives peacefully with a primitive native tribe as their unwritten honky ruler.

Also acting as our narrator for instant story immersion, a meaty police inspector (Adrian Hoven, Jess Franco’s Succubus) flies over to help break up the slave-trading game going on … and maybe fall in love, as he figures Liane/Diane could go a long way in assisting his peace talks.

Or something like that. At barely over an hour, Nature Girl (aka Jungle Girl and the Slaver) is too limited a time to explore real-world issues. Besides, that’s not what movies of this ilk were about; they were intended to take advantage of their foreign setting in order to satiate the male moviegoer’s desire in seeing some tit. Although barely covered by her hair and the aforementioned shells, Liane does not bare her breasts (a good thing, considering how underage she appears), whereas literally dozens of black women go completely topless and dance around with no regard to the effects of gravity and motion. In essence, director Hermann Leitner has delivered an issue of National Geographic come to dusty life, replete with stock footage of wild animals inserted willy-nilly, with no one shot matching those bookending it.

This nonchalance carries over to Leitner’s treatment of his heroine; Michael plays Liane smart and fluent in one scene, only to shift to bone-stupid and monosyllabic the next. At least half of Nature Girl and the Slaver’s benign enjoyment is the disinterested dub, so comical in nature that at first, the film sounds like a Mad Movies performance of loving mockery. If there’s a chapter that deserves such skewering, however, it’s the third and final chapter, 1961’s Liane, Daughter of the Jungle, which edits the previous two adventures into one. —Rod Lott

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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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