Color, 1979, 89m. / Directed by Mark L. Lester / Starring Bo Svenson, Anita Ekberg / Image (US R0 NTSC)
You'd really be hard pressed to find a more peculiar mix of actors stranded in a weirder project. Well past her prime, Ekberg looks less than flattering in her revealing, strapless dresses, while Romanus looks tired and cranky. Pleasence livens up his relatively brief screen time, bouncing around and cackling with glee, while Svenson... well, if you've seen a single movie with him, you know what to expect. Nothing terribly violent or sexy ever happens, this being a TV movie and all, but the kitsch piles on fast and furious. Directorial chores were handled by Mark Lester, who later hit his stride, relatively speaking, with '80s actioners like Class of 1984, Commando, and Firestarter. Obviously his heart wasn't really in this one, but can you blame him? At least everyone got to have a nice vacation in the jungle and seemed to be having a good time, which is nice. Various video companies like Embassy have been trying to lure in rental patrons
Though you'd never guess it from that cast, Gold of the Amazon Women was intended as an all-star international television production in the late '70s, apparently in a bid to bring the scale and star power of big screen productions to the cathode tube. What viewers got instead was one of the most unintentionally hilarious chunks of Eurocheese imaginable, a companion piece to such jungle disasters as Hundra and Mighty Peking Man. Break out the hard booze for this one, folks. We begin in a modern day city, apparently
meant to be New York, where a couple of feisty Amazon women are running rampant across the rooftops and causing all sorts of mayhem. Eventually they wind up dead thanks to a handy crossbow, but there are more where they came from. Evidently a group of amazons guard the prized city of gold, El Dorado, and it's up to two intrepid explorers, Tom (Bo Svenson) and Luis (Robert Romanus), to cut through the miles of wilderness to reach it. Along the way they encounter various jungle adventures, mostly involving one or both of them getting tossed into bamboo cages and having encounters with scantily clad women, while another nefarious rival explorer, Clarence 
(Donald Pleasence), searches for the golden city with his two bubbleheaded sidekicks. The amazon queen, Winnina (Anita Ekberg), proves more receptive than expected to the great American hunters, and much tepid mayhem ensues. 
with this sucker under such titles as Quest for the Seven Cities, but the DVD preserves the original title and looks about as good as one could expect. It still has that flat, slightly cruddy look prevalent in '70s television films, particularly during the opening scenes, but the colors are strong enough and the compression appears flawless. The mono audio is about the same as it's always been, with the bombastic score by Gil Melle (best known for his work on Night Gallery) trying desperately to keep the action going. If you're a big fan of surreal, late night TV movies that seem to have wandered in from some alternate universe, this should be just your plate of cheese.
