Better with the sound off

dbborroughs

Just Jaekin's film based on John Willie's bondage comic The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline. In in the Orient in the 1920's or 30's Gwendoline and her best friend ship themselves over seas in order to find her missing father. Gwen is discovered in a crate and kidnapped and brought to a crime boss. Rescued by accident by a handsome hunk of a guy Gwen, her friend and the guy end up wandering off into the jungle/desert/lost city in order to find her father.

As you can tell from the lack of names this really isn't good enough to pay attention to. Sure it has lots of beautiful women (almost all of the naked or semi-naked variety) and some decent action, but the over all direction (a bit too slack)and much too whimsical script under cuts its ability to send up films of the Indiana Jones variety.Yes its amusing for 20 minutes or so but then you realize that there are 80 more to go and you end up groaning loudly.

The selling point of the film is the look. Its very much a fetishists dream with the lost city's Amazons all dressed in revealing leather, while the city itself contains some very nasty torture devices. it looks great and to be honest its the sort of thing thats gonna play oh so much better with the sound off.

I'm still pondering how the heck I ended up with a copy of the film on DVD since even though I've read some recent vintage articles on the film which argued its better than its reputation, I never really liked the film much when I saw it all those years ago when I managed a video store. Still the extras are informative, and there always is the resale market.

I'd take a pass on this one.

score 4/10

dbborroughs 24 December 2007

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1786094/