Directed by Rene Cardona Jr., Treasure of the Amazon is a dawdling jungle picture that is occasionally punctuated by some decent gore and/or animal attack footage. There are three main plot threads. The first involves Stuart Whitman as a grizzled boat captain leading a party down the Amazon searching for gold. The second finds a hotshot pilot Bradford Dillman and his friends uncovering a cache of diamonds in the jungle. The third revolves around Nazi Donald Pleasence hiding out in the jungle and trying to restart the Third Reich with the diamonds. These plot threads eventually all come together, but Cardona sure takes his sweet time getting around to it.
The pacing plods along without much momentum or urgency. The upside is that when something finally does happen, it seems a lot cooler than it probably would’ve seemed had it occurred in a good movie. The highlight is a gnarly crab attack where a man is tied up and dozens of creepy crawling crabs pinch his ears and lips and claw out his eyes. There’s also a sequence where someone is strung up by a giant fish hook, although the goofy tongue effect kind of diminishes the reveal.
At least the cast is fairly strong, which may help keep you watching whenever the top-heavy plot starts spinning its wheels. Whitman gets a great introduction sequence where he is startled out of a drunken slumber by a crew member trying to pick his pocket, and he cuts the guy’s finger off. When the dude attacks him, Whitman tosses the guy overboard and he is devoured by piranhas. Lesson learned: Don’t fuck with drunken Stuart Whitman.
Pleasence looks gaunt and tired, but still manages to chew the scenery with his usual zeal. John Ireland has a few good moments as the priest who dishes out a lot of exposition, and Cardona regular Hugo Stiglitz also turns up as yet another grizzled boat captain. It’s Sofia Infante though who makes the most memorable impression as Pleasence’s frequently topless native “wife”.
Whitman, Dillman, Ireland, and Stiglitz were all in Cardona’s Guyana: Cult of the Damned six years earlier.
AKA: Treasure of Doom. AKA: Greed.
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