Les amazones du temple d’or [Golden Temple Amazons] (1986)

(On Cable TV, June 2021) What a terrible movie.  Lazily designed, incompetently executed and without any redeeming value, Les amazones du temple d’or is cheap exploitation cinema at its near-worst. The plot is something about a young woman taking revenge on a savage tribe fifteen years after they murdered her parents, but that’s really an excuse to portray naked women, perfunctory violence, shoddy sets and terrible acting. A fair warning, though: the women look nice, but the nudity is not worth the aggravation of the rest of the film. Bad-movie aficionados will recognize that the film wasn’t bad by accident: as an Eurocine production co-directed (that should be “serially directed”) by Jess Franco and Alain Payet, the film was never made to be good: it was made to be just good enough to play in eurotrash theatres and rake in the profits from patrons lured in by the (admittedly good) poster. While bloody, the film avoids the kind of extreme gore that many similar films went for, so that’s already a step up from the bottom of the barrel. Oh, and there are some nice (non-murdery) interactions with wildlife that are not all out of stock footage. Clearly, I’m grasping at straws to say something nice about something that’s fundamentally not good. But most casual film fans do not know that there’s an entire subcategory of cinema that does not aspire to artistic merit and can’t even manage acceptable execution—Les amazones du temple d’or is not good, but even then it’s far from the worst example of those.