Blu-ray Review: Invaders of the Lost Gold (1982)

Picture it; the Philippines, 1945… a Japanese platoon, with voices so outlandishly dubbed that they border on the insane (everyone in this film suffers the same fate), are waylaid by an indigenous tribe that really isn’t into the idea of someone fucking around on their land… and by “waylaid” I mean “absolutely slaughtered via gore drenched violence” (this shit even features samurai swords versus primitive knives… it’s fucking cool as shit… ).
Some Thirty-odd years later, fortune hunter Rex Larson (Edmund Purdom) is hot on the trail of the gold those aforementioned soldiers hid before they met their drizzly demise, but he finds most of the remaining soldiers a little uncooperative (one of them commits hari-kari in an absurdly over-the-top manner accompanied by a gong strike… you can’t even make this shit up cats n’ creeps… ).
Soon Rex is joined by a rag-tag team of misfits who’s ranks include TV mainstay/Murder She Wrote regular Stuart Whitman, Spartacus‘ Woody Strode (who also starred in plenty of spaghetti westerns as well), Harold “eternally credited as Odd Job) Sakata, and long-time Emanuelle/full-time knock-out Laura Gemser. These folks are soon up the river and surrounded by all manner of jungle-jungle based terror as the body count rises as our heroes get ever closer to that terrific treasure!
You want unenthusiastic go-go dancing, villains that actually say “I keeeel you”, jungle strolls… a lot of jungle strolls, slow motion death sequences that get grainy as all fuck, rando gore, and a dash of casual racism (the times, the times… )? If you answered “yes” to any of that (hopefully not to the “racism” part), then Invaders of the Lost Gold is made for your viewing displeasure!
Filled to the brim with familiar faces, this film makes baffling choices at every turn in regards to nearly all aspects of the production. For starters, the tone is all over the map; Is this a gory jungle holocaust type of affair, a Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure romp, or a soft core T&A vehicle? Well, it’s all of them and more… and while it does none of them perfectly… or “well”, it nevertheless forms a witches’ brew of cinematic nonsense that still manages to be fun.
As for special features we get a “warts and all” discussion of the film with director Alan Birkinshaw, and a selection of interviews (with Birkinshaw and producer/co-writer/exploitation God Dick Randall’s widow Corliss, if you’re taking notes at home) culled from the cutting room floor of Mark Hartley’s 2010 Filipino genre-cinema documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed!
Invaders of the Lost Gold is absurd; it’s high adventure created for a low price but it never fails to provide jaw-dropping moments throughout!