Invaders Of The Lost Gold

Gemser And Makepeace

Invaders Of The Lost Gold
aka Horror Safari
aka Safari Cannibale
aka Greed
Directed by Alan Birkinshaw
Hong Kong 1982 
Severin Films Blu Ray Zone A

Wow. This is the kind of movie where you really have to wonder how it exists and why it was ever made. Answer... because it was financed by notorious, low budget ‘opportunity seizer’ Dick Randall (who produced and sometimes acted in such films as Pieces, The French Sex Murders and even Bava’s Four Times That Night). He was kind of a green light and a red light for movies both at the same time but, yeah, nobody could deny his passion for cinema, for sure.

This quickie, Invaders Of The Lost Gold, which was made in the Philippines, appealed to me mostly because of the two main actresses. It has Laura Gemser, famous for Black Emanuelle* and a whole host of other ‘single M’ Emanuelle movies (I think she even had a part in one of the ‘double M’ Emmanuelle movies at some point too) and, in the main lead with an ‘introducing’credit, we have Glynis Barber (replacing Britt Ekland who wisely dropped out before shooting started). Remember her? She played, among other things, Soolin in Blake’s Seven (in the later seasons when Blake wasn’t even in it), Jane (in the serialised BBC adaptation of the saucy World War two newspaper strip of the same name) and, of course, Makepeace in Dempsey And Makepeace (going on to marry her co-star Michael Brandon). This wasn’t her first role. I think she was doing Blake’s Seven before this... but I guess it’s her first feature film role, to justify the credit Dick Randall gave her. Either way, she’s probably the most competent of the performers in this movie... which given the big name cast, I think says more about her enthusiasm than anything else. I get the feeling from watching this that the rest of the cast are not exactly treating this film like it’s ‘A material’... which to be fair it decidedly isn’t... but whatever, she comes off as one of the most credible in the cast (as does Laura Gemser actually).

So I teased a big name cast and here it is... we have Stuart Whitman playing the male lead Mark Forrest (he’s twenty seven years older than Barber but she’s supposed to be his love interest), Edmund Purdom as Rex Larson (the villain of the piece), Woody Strode as the bodyguard/butler of the financier of the expedition in the movie (Barber plays the money man’s daughter) and Harold Sakata, who played Odd Job in Goldfinger, reviewed here) as a former officer in the Japanese army.

The film starts off in 1945, when an offshoot of the Japanese army, based in the Philippines, are attacked and almost completely wiped out by headhunters... but not before they hide their chests of gold in a cave to be collected years later when it’s safe to do so. Then, 36 years later, the villain of the piece... after killing one of the officers for non-compliance and then being cheated from collaborating with a second who kills himself... grabs Sakata to help on an expedition to find the lost gold. Much to his dismay, the financier hires Whitman, who Purdom’s character has treacherous history with, to lead the team and he also goes along, bringing his daughter and various other helpers.

And the rest of the film is watching almost the whole team get picked off one by one by, sometimes mysterious, attacks by wildlife or... well I’m not always sure... until we get a stand off between Whitman and Purdom with Barber looking on. The end... really nothing much to see here folks. That being said, the director has gone on record as being rightfully proud of pulling off a... mostly... cohesive adventure yarn under terrible circumstances and with a special Dick Randall budget (aka excessively low) while also rewriting the script day by day as the film shot.

It’s dreadful and not quite exploitative, apart from one scene near the end where Gemser sheds her clothes and goes swimming before dropping out of the picture in the most puzzling manner... and it has the occasional piece of ‘practical effects violence’, which they sometimes get away with but often don’t, in my opinion.

Whenever a major character dies, the film goes into a bizarre slow motion effect so you know something bad is happening... even though the details of that are not really present on screen. For example, a slow motion crocodile attack doesn’t have any shots of the crocodile or victim sharing the screen (and the crocodile in certain moments looks like it might even have been tracked in from another movie) but we’re somehow supposed to surmise that a character has been eaten. Of the slow motion deaths on display though, Laura Gemser’s swimming death is the most perplexing. One minute she’s swimming around backstroke to show some of the movie’s sexy assets... the next she is keeling over in slow motion in the water and, when her body is found, even the other characters can’t figure out how or why she died. I dunno... it’s as much of a puzzle to the audience... maybe a heart attack?

The music is bizarre too. Francesco De Masi provided the score but it feels wholly inappropriate to the images and I’d have said it was just needle dropped in from another movie. But the director mentions ‘doing the music’ so I can only assume it’s an original composition. I’d say it harms the film somewhat but, with the amount of harm it does itself anyway, it’s already kind of bulletproof.

I’d have to say though that, even though the film is kinda trashy... and not in a sleazy way, worse luck, just seeming like it’s cobbled together from air (no disrespect to the director, who obviously managed to make a lot more of it than many might)... I somehow really enjoyed this one and don’t regret my purchase in any way. I don’t know why but, I had a smile on my face from beginning to end throughout this one... possibly because of the juxtaposition of the various ‘unlikely bedfellows’ in terms of the acting talent. Severin’s Blu Ray transfer is beautiful (although the state of the slow motion sequences is, I suspect, not something they would possibly have been able to fix) and there are a couple of nice extras on here too. One where the director talks about the filming and we hear stories about the reluctant crocodile and the bizarre, eccentric and aggressive sense of competitiveness between Whitman and Purdom... and another which is two long interviews with the both the director and Dick Randall’s widow (she always has good stories) which are both outtakes from the documentary movie Machete Maidens Unleased (which I reviewed here).

And there you have it... Invaders Of The Lost Gold is not a film I’d recommend to anyone but saying that, it found a warm place in my heart and it’s the perfect film to programme in the middle of an all nighter moviethon to give the audience a bit of a pause before getting their second wind, I reckon. One I’m pleased to have on the shelf. 

*There should be a whole raft of Black Emanuelle reviews coming soon to the blog within the next twelve months or so. I'm eight fims into the box set at time of writing.