GOLDEN TEMPLE AMAZONS

By: BRIAN THOMAS
Review Date: Wednesday, March 09, 2005

In the 1980s, the sword & sorcery genre was quick to morph into knock-offs of MAD MAX and Indiana Jones movies, leaving us with a big pile of cheesy cinema curds to enjoy twenty years later. It seems inevitable that Europe's exploitation king Jess Franco would get involved in such lucrative cross-genre pollination. It seems just as inevitable that Franco's contribution would be a bit more perverse than, say, BEASTMASTER. This is clearly evident in the first shot, which captures a squad of topless amazons as they ride horses toward the camera in slow motion. In fact, Franco's film AMAZONS DU TEMPLE D'OR is actually a reprise of the German made jungle girl films of the 1950s. The most well known of these, LIANE THE JUNGLE GODDESS, is now available on DVD from Retromedia in a twin bill with TERROR OF THE BLOODHUNTERS. Franco had already used this idea in 1983 for EL TESORO DE LA DIOSA BLANCA ("Treasure of the White Goddess"), which has so far not been given a US release.

Those half-naked Amazons are on their way to kill a jungle missionary couple with poison arrows. However, they forget to murder their young daughter Liane. She grows to maturity in the company of her friendly animal pals, frolicking in the bush. Well, maybe thins weren't always so friendly Liane's costume consists of a leopard skin thong and boots, with a necklace of fox tails (!) hanging around her neck.

Analía Ivars, billed as "Joan Virly" in territories unwilling to use the name "Analia", stars as the husky jungle girl Liane, and the jungle drums still tell the tale of her bad acting. The adult Liane is found by her father's friend Johnstone, who reads to her how her parents came to be murdered from her father's diary. Seems dad (Claude Boisson) discovered the Amazon's golden temple or "fortress or bunker" high in the Blue Mountains, and made off with some of their gold, and he and his wife received jungle justice. Despite her parents' guilt, Liane sets off for the Blue Mountains to get revenge, taking along witch doctor Koukou (Jean-René Gossart) and her chimpanzee buddy Rocky.

Our heroes soon cross paths with the safari of an archaeologist named Harvey Mason, who is also hunting for the Golden Temple. Perhaps to keep out thieves like Liane's pop, the amazons have since invented a mist that causes unconsciousness to protect their territory, and after far too much wandering, the party finds their way into the Amazon's caves and are captured. Getting captured seems to be a specialty of Liane's this is the third time already, and not even an hour into the movie. The Amazon's leader Uruck (a stoned performance from Eurostar William Berger) decides he likes Liane's looks, and orders his one-eyed security chief Rina to induct her into the tribe and kill the others. Why they don't just use them for slave labor in the gold mine (the slaves they've got don't look like they're working very hard) is unknown, but stupidity is one explanation. It might be that decades of using only one guy to father a whole tribe has corroded the gene pool.


Liane makes it through a night in Uruck's torture chamber, and still manages to beat Rina in a battle staged in the hallway outside Uruck's chambers quite possibly the worst movie fight scene ever. Pulled into Uruck's bedroom to make more Amazons, Liane instead kills him and escapes, but of course is immediately recaptured. The fate of our heroes rests on whether Rocky the chimp is smart enough to get the keys Liane has hidden in her loincloth and save the day.

As a thumbnail description girl hero in action and adventure with her wild animal friends GOLDEN TEMPLE AMAZONS sounds like a good candidate for a family matinee. But first you'd have to edit out every scene involving nudity, sadism, bloody violence and horrible torture, leaving you with a movie about five minutes long. Franco is not officially credited with directing, leaving open the question of what scenes he shot and which were completed by co-director Alain Payet (HELGA, SHE-WOLF OF SPILBERG). But it seems a safe bet that Franco was responsible for the sequence in which Harvey and his wife Bella are whipped until they fall on a bed of spray-painted gold spikes. In the disc's extras, an interview with Daniel Lasoeur, CEO of French exploitation studio Eurociné, explains that Franco's name was left off to comply with France's laws concerning domestic productions, as well as answering 13 minutes worth of other questions about the production.

The disc also has some excised footage of Ivars, who is still appearing in Franco's films, interacting with the animals (all shot in a French zoo), plus some more of those Amazons on horseback. There's a generous photo and ad art gallery, but it's impossible to step forward or backward through it. A lengthy (9m) "promotional trailer" is actually a condensation of the entire film.

The Internet Movie Database confuses the title of this film with that of Franco's late (1973) entry in the peplum cycle, AMAZON GOLDEN TEMPLE (aka LUSTFUL AMAZONS), and Media Blasters repeats that mistake on their packaging.


Copyright © 2005 Brian Thomas, author of the massive book VideoHound's DRAGON: ASIAN ACTION & CULT FLICKS.
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