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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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5
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5 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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A
Mexican entry (filmed in English) in the exploitation/jungle
movie sweepstakes of the 1980s, Treasure
of the Amazon manages to equal or surpass most of its
European contemporaries in a number of areas. It's not quite
as sleazy or gory, true. But a solid B-movie cast, great location
filming and competent direction give it a leg up in certain
respects. This isn't to say it's not cheesy or silly,
however... which it most certainly is. (Thank goodness.)
Veteran American character actor/drive-in headliner Stuart Whitman
(Shatter, Night
of the Lepus) is Gringo, a crotchety old trader who
sells beads and other trinkets to the Indian tribes inhabiting
the remotest regions of the Amazon jungle. He's said to be a
bit touched in the head ever since emerging as the sole survivor
of a gold-hunting expedition that was slaughtered by headhunters.
Now he's approached by two soldiers of fortune, Zapata (Pedro
Armendáriz Jr.) and Jaime (Jorge Luke), with a proposition.
The pair have been
following a shipment of supplies being transported upriver by
steamboat. They've learned that the crates are to be delivered
to a German named Klaus von Blantz (Halloween's
Donald Pleasence), a ruthless SS war criminal who hunts for
treasure to finance a Fourth Reich movement in Argentina. It
would seem that von Blantz is going after the same gold that
cost Gringo's friends their heads years earlier. Zapata and
Jaime want him to guide them through the jungle so they can
get to the gold before the German does; the spoils will be divided
into three equal shares. Gringo hates von Blantz (for no specified
reason beyond his being a Nazi) and so agrees to the deal. He
tells the men of another fabled treasure, however: diamonds
"the size of your eye!" These legendary stones are
said to lie somewhere in the same general area through which
they'll trek — smack dab in the middle of headhunter country.
As von Blantz sets off by mule accompanied by his topless Amazonian
slave girl (Sonia Infante), Gringo and company board native
canoes on a different route across a swamp teeming with man-eating
piranha and alligators.
You'd think this
would be plenty of story to propel an adventure flick, but writer-director
René Cardona Jr. foists a whole other subplot and set
of characters on us. Members of an oil survey team encamped
near headhunter lands accidentally discover some buried skeletons
with missing skulls. Found
among the remains are a couple of large diamonds. The surveyor
(Clark Jarrett) and his pilot buddy (Piranha's
Bradford Dillman) decide to stick around for awhile and
search for more gems, even though they've been recalled by the
oil company. Surveyor Guy's girlfriend, southern belle Barbara
(British actress Ann Sidney, a former Miss World), really wanted
to leave the jungle but quickly changes her mind at the prospect
of striking it rich. The pilot takes off in his amphibious plane
to get additional supplies but a mechanical problem forces him
to land on the river with no way to communicate with his pals.
While he's gone Barbara and Surveyor Guy (who wears short-shorts
snugger than his girlfriend's!) stumble upon a cave containing
a king's ransom in diamonds. In the meantime the expeditions
of both Gringo and von Blantz are approaching the area. The
local headhunters take a dim view of these intrusions into their
territory...
The above synopsis encompasses
only the first hour of the
film, which is at least 15 minutes too long for its own good.
The story is padded with pointless plot threads that don't really
go anywhere. Dillman flies off and then almost disappears
completely, showing up again in the final few minutes. The expected
confrontation between Gringo and von Blantz never takes place;
in fact, Pleasence's character barely interacts with the other
major cast members. He does get to blast a number of headhunters
with a submachine gun, although the main reason he seems to
be in the film is simply because he has a bare-breasted companion.
(Alas, Sonia Infante's mammaries constitute 95% of the female
nudity. Ann Sidney never gets naked. Were this a European production
you could bet your bottom dollar that the Barbara character
would have either [a] had a full-frontal skinny-dipping scene
— it gets very hot in the jungle, you know — or [b] been
captured by the headhunters and immediately stripped to her
birthday suit.) Other familiar faces are likewise wasted:
John Ireland, a Hollywood leading man in the 1940s, phones in
his insignificant role as a priest; character actor Emilio Fernández
(Bring Me the
Head of Alfredo Garcia) chews up screen time as a greedy
tribal chieftain with a harem of topless, mudwrestling native
girls; Mexican film/TV star Hugo Stiglitz (Nightmare
City) has a surprisingly tiny part as a scruffy riverboat
captain. Accompanying all this plot padding is a corny, ostentatious
music score that would've seemed overly melodramatic back in
the '50s. The film's supposedly amusing finale is rather anticlimactic
(to say the least) considering this is ostensibly an action-adventure
flick. In the end the movie just peters out.
So what is there exactly that
makes Treasure of the Amazon
at least worth a view? Occasional choppy editing aside, it's
well-directed by Cardona, who gets great mileage out of some
actual South American locations.
Unlike the vast majority of jungle adventures, shots involving
animals (birds, snakes, gators, monkeys, tapirs, anteaters,
etc.) don't blatantly stick out as insertions of stock footage;
instead they're seamlessly blended in. (Animal scenes were either
filmed on location or must've been culled from very contemporary
sources.) There isn't as much action as there could have —
and should have —
been, but sufficient carnage is provided via periodic headhunter
attacks. Throats are cut and heads are chopped off along with
the expected death by piranha and alligator. (What else are
native bearers for?) The standout gore scene is a direct rip-off
of the infamous tarantula sequence from Lucio Fulci's The
Beyond, substituting flesh-hungry cave crabs (???)
for face-muching spiders. Nor can one have a Mexican exploitation
flick without cheese... Here's it's mostly provided via the
dumb dialog and some of the goofy performances. Sidney's
southern accent is laughably bad; Donald Pleasence, of course,
has the ability to hammily overact without so much as lifting
a finger.
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VCI
has put together a decent edition of Treasure
of the Amazon.
The colorful cover artwork is certainly eye-catching, with a great
(and naturally somewhat misleading) pulp-style painting depicting
the grizzled, 60-year old Stuart Whitman as a strapping, barrel-chested
he-man in the Doc Savage mold! Only minor, very fleeting instances
of print damage mar what is otherwise an
exceptional-looking widescreen transfer, presenting the film in
its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Images are generally sharp and
the riot of jungle colors quite vivid. (Less so during the opening
credits, however.) The packaging doesn't say whether or not the
transfer is anamorphic but when I popped the disc in my portable
player the film looked squeezed when set to 16x9 mode. A definite
labeling faux pas concerns the audio. Billed as Dolby stereo on
the cover, it sure sounded like your standard, run-of-the-mill
mono mix to me. The often bombastic score overpowers the dialog
in a few spots, which is sometimes hard to catch the first time
around due to some of the actors' thick Hispanic accents.
Extras are limited
to brief text biographies (of Whitman, Pleasence, Dillman, Fernández,
Armendáriz Jr. and director Cardona), the trailer for Treasure
of the Amazon, plus
three trailers for other Cardona-helmed flicks:
Guyana: Crime of the Century
(a fictionalized take on wacko cult leader Jim Jones, also starring
Whitman), the nautical supernatural thriller
The Bermuda Triangle, and Cyclone,
an exploitation melding of disaster film clichés and the
cannibal genre.
7/12/05 |
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