Bad acting tries to excuse itself as humor, & this film is sometimes painful to watch, since presumedly the lousy cast did at one time dream of being actors.
The film borrows many cliches from old pulp magazines & Saturday matinee serials, including race stereotypes & a jumble of animals of all continents & Australian laughing jackass soundtrack, with no twists or updates for any it, & beyond-bad FX for supernatural events which even the cheap old serials did better.
The killed-by-ceiling-fan sequence was typical of the nonsense that neither made sense nor was funny. This mess could be regarded a loving tribute to the pulps except it's so darned bad that it comes across as a group of down's syndrome kids trying to write, direct, & act in a bad imitation of Jewel of the Nile.
There is a bad-guy & bad-gal comedy relief team seemingly based on Boris Badinof & Nastasha, so poorly integrated into the story that the protagonist never even notices they exist until near the meandering end of the film.
The best thing on the disc is an interview with the Z-director Ulli Lommel (who starred himself as one of the villains; for many viewers it will be surprising to realize his dorky villain accent is his actual voice). He spends the interview mostly trashing Klaus Kinsky who was a raving maniac on the set just about impossible to work with.
Klaus is only in the film for a couple minutes & I figure directors like these deserve a hard time if they hire a grand total of one heard-of actor not for the film but for the advertising, then kill him off in the first scene so that we're stuck watching lame amateur actors for the bulk of a movie.
Knowing from the interview what hell the director went through adapting the script on-the-fly to meet Kinsky's lunatic demands makes Kinsky's couple tiny scenes much more interesting than any other part of the film, so Kinsky almost saves this fiasco even from the grave.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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