Movie Reviews : Cast, Plot Sink in ‘River of Death’

As you sink into the turbid depths of the new adventure movie “River of Death” (citywide), you may find yourself fighting off irritation, sleep, nausea. This movie is the equivalent of jungle fever. It puts you under fast, knocks you out for the duration. Before your eyes, as if in some awful dream, swim a succession of bizarre images, each more demented than the last.

On and on they come: a Nazi enclave, in which a mad, suave scientist, Wolfgang Manteuffel (Robert Vaughn) engineers a dastardly triple-cross; Manteuffel’s knee-capped enemy, watery-eyed Heinrich Spaatz (Donald Pleasence), limping after him two decades later through the jungles of South America; vile plagues and rampaging cannibals; two dwarf wrestlers cavorting before a deranged audience; a butch German songstress wailing an S&M; ballad to a skeleton; hippopotami, crocodiles, pirates, crashed helicopters; Michael Dudikoff, in an Indiana Jones hat, darting his eyes around like Mel Gibson’s nervous younger brother, and L.Q. Jones, with no “Wild Bunch” to rescue him.

What is the reason for all this suffering and misery? Actually, despite an “Uncle Scrooge”-style red herring about a lost city, the mad Manteuffel has carved out a kingdom of cannibals and young Nazis (from where?) and has perfected a virus that will wipe out all non-Aryans. Meanwhile, the relentless searcher Dudikoff narrates truculently and director Steve (“Big Bad Mama”) Carver gets fixated on war paint and explosions.

Overall, this hapless movie’s strategy seems to be to squeeze Alistair MacLean’s story lugubriously through the send-up style of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and hope the jungle scenery and desultory hamminess of Pleasence and Herbert Lom (as another villain) will distract the audience from everything else. It doesn’t work.

Practically every speaking member of the cast has been killed by the end of “River of Death” (MPAA-rated R for violence, sex and language) and the earliest victims were the lucky ones.