"Gold Raiders" (No stars out of ****) deserves to be in the All-Time Bad Movie Hall of Shame. This egregious shlock lacks any redeeming features, except that everything in it goes terribly, horribly, hilariously awful. Robert Ginty of "The Exterminator" movies must have needed a pay check and a vacation, since it doesn't appear that anything else could have attracted him to this shoddy saga about the recovery of a fortune in Swiss gold from the jungle. Ginty as Mark Banner joins up with a ragtag group of Philipinos that are dispatched to bring back the gold after a plane shot down the cargo plane transporting it. Our heroes finds themselves squared off against a Communist commander who isn't beneath shooting his own men with the occasion dictates. He qualifies as a classic villain because he wears a mustache, shaves his head like all good evil bad guys, and enjoys rough sex with abducted women. The high point of this pointless adventure thriller comes when our nasty villain finishes having sex with one poor female and turns around to screw his fake wooden leg back on to his body. Inexplicably, the villain's pet German shepherd decides on impulse to snatch up the leg in his jaws and hightail it. Our hopping mad bad guy pursues the pooch and fires a couple of shots at the thieving canine that eventually discards the commander's leg. One incredibly schlocky line of dialogue goes something like this: "You're too beautiful a woman to be a sadist." Our never-say-die heroes embark on a journey of hardship, lessened somewhat when Mark Banner unveils a motorcycle powered by crystal fuel cells (this bikes smokes horribly) and it comes equipped with a powered para-sail that turns it into a flying motorcycle, armed as the case is with rockets. Probably the most incredible feat occurs when our hero rides his bike across a gorge on one flimsy steel cable. Like the other commentators have observed about "Gold Raiders," it suffers from poor dubbing. When I mean poor dubbing, not only do the lines rarely match the mouths, but virtually everybody sounds like they were dubbed by people of an entirely different nationality, making the lines doubly incongruous. A Filipino guy sounds like an American golf announcer with a deep, heavy accent. Improbable and sometimes bloodthirsty, "Gold Raiders" robs the bottom of the barrel. Truly, this is a movie that should be reserved for special occasions when you want to treat somebody to a genuinely rotten movie. Oh, yes, check out the phony looking fishing scene and the giant shark-like fish that the Filipino's fishermen harpoon.
CINEMATIC REVELATIONS allows me the luxury of writing, editing and archiving my film and television reviews. Some reviews appeared initially in "The Commercial Dispatch" and "The Planet Weekly" and then later in the comment archives at the Internet Movie Database. IMDB.COM, however, imposes a limit on both the number of words and the number of times that an author may revise their comments. I hope that anybody who peruses these expanded reviews will find them useful.
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