When Golden Temple Amazons first opens, we see a posse of half naked women
(those very same Golden Temple Amazons!) on horseback riding through a dense
forest. These babes have bow and arrows, and they use them to kill a couple who
live in a house nearby (watch closely and you can see the female victim actually
holding the arrow to her chest as she falls). Their little daughter comes
running out and kneels over the bodies of her dead parents, where she pleads for
them in badly dubbed English. We then cut to a scene of a young woman standing
in the woods calling somebody named Rocky via a very silly yodel that’s a cross
between Tarzan’s yell and a moose’s mating call. I swear, it’s barely five
minutes into the film, and already I want to shut it off, despite all the naked
women running around.
Just when I think the woman, whose name is Liana, is trying to do a bad
Bullwinkle impersonation ("Hey Rocky!"), it turns out that Rocky is the name of
her trusty chimpanzee (who's just like Tarzan's chimp Cheetah--but unlike
Cheetah, Rocky's dumber than a bag of hammers).
Liana is the little girl whose parents were killed by the
cranky Amazons. She’s been raised in the jungles by the native people and has
grown up to be a low-rent Sheena (which isn’t saying much, since Sheena herself
was sort of a low-rent female version of Tarzan). She's clad in a silly looking
outfit that consists of what looks like three rabbit pelts hanging over her
chest. The pelts swing freely around, often exposing Liana's breasts in plain
view--which was probably the main idea behind this design in the first place,
because God knows nobody's watching this film for its taunt plot.
Liana is happy frolicking in
the jungle with her animal friends, until she’s called back to her old home by
the new missionary who has taken over the place (played by a guy who really likes
to chew the scenery--his wild hand gesturing has to be seen to be believed). The mad missionary reads to Liana her father’s journal, which explains how her
old man was a greedy
bastard who trespassed onto the Amazon’s land, stole their gold, and then
laughed at their warning for him to leave. Liana swears vengeance against the
Amazons, even though her avarice-smitten parents pretty much got what was
coming to them. Yet off Liana goes, into the deep jungles, where it isn’t a
couple of minutes into her quest when she promptly gets caught up in a net and
starts screaming for help like a common tourist. So much for the great epic
stories of Liana, Queen Of The Jungle….
Golden Temple Amazons refer to the fact that the Amazons are sitting on a gold
mine…literally! And they don’t take too kindly to strangers dropping in. So
Liana and her friends are tortured by the evil Rena, an eye patch-wearing broad
who looked like she wandered off the set of Ilsa, She-Wolf Of The SS (and left
some of her clothing behind). Filled
with long, ponderous takes (was the film editor on strike?) as well as really
bad over-acting, Golden Temple Amazons is so lame and awful that it actually
makes Sheena, another Jungle Girl movie that I trashed, look like Gone With The
Wind in comparison. It’s just so ridiculous, that it's hard to take even as a
comedy. If you’re in the mood for a jungle film, do yourself a
favor and watch Tarzan, instead. Heck, Sheena would even be a better choice than
this.
--SF
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