Lars Jacobsson
Nothing too exiting here but a pretty entertaining thai action/adventure romp with an international cast (well... Burt Reynolds seemed to have had other obligations but they did get the lovably lame Robert Ginty, looking as wimpy as ever, and a cute caucasian girl who's acting abilities are limited to looking angry and/or horny whatever takes place in the movie... hey, good enough for me). As often when there's more than one county involved in the production we get an clichéd espionage story with a gold treasure that many parts are after - my guess is they were reaching for sort of a mixture between James Bond and Rambo with some local thai spice to make it exotic for foreign sales. We get some dumb dubbing, a high body count with lots of juicy squibs, a glide-flying motorcycle with a built-in rocket launcher (sadly the only gadget, but a good one indeed!), great evil communists, a character named Porn - who gets sick and is replaced by Penporn (did the writers see Café Flesh? ) and best of all - an underground Mario Bava-esquire lit cave filled with fat, super-duper-mega evil vampire bats with gleaming red eyes! Best vampire bats ever. But maybe I oversell it now, the film do have some obvious problems that makes land at "enjoyable B movie" rather than "trash action classic". Especially the pacing and cutting feels very... thai (judging from the few other 70s and 80s thai films i've seen). Even though there's action and excitement in almost every scene the movie still drags a lot in parts, and it's a bit overlong too. Still worth checking out for fans of trashy 80s action Asian B films though, it gets a mild recommendation from me.The Swedish video release I saw had a perfect widescreen print and has the line "The Exterminator man is back" all over the front, back and side of the cover. They even renamed the film GOLDRAIDERS (The Exterminator Man is back!) on the tape label. You've gotta miss the early days of video when even bloody Robert Ginty was a selling name!
zardoz-13
"Gold Raiders" deserves to be in the All-Time Bad Movie Hall of Shame. This egregious shlock lacks any redeeming features, except that everything goes terribly, horribly, hilariously awful. Robert Ginty of "The Exterminator" movies must have needed a pay check and a vacation, since it doesn't appear that anything else could have attracted him to this shoddy saga about the recovery of a fortune in Swiss gold from the jungle. Ginty as Mark Banner joins up with a ragtag group of Philipinos that are dispatched to bring back the gold after a plane shot down the cargo plane transporting it. Our heroes finds themselves squared off against a Communist commander who isn't beneath shooting his own men with the occasion dictates. He qualifies as a classic villain because he wears a mustache, shaves his head like all good evil bad guys, and enjoys rough sex with abducted women. The high point of this pointless adventure thriller comes when our nasty villain finishes having sex with one poor female and turns around to screw his fake wooden leg back on to his body. Inexplicably, the villain's pet German shepherd decides on impulse to snatch up the leg in his jaws and hightail it. Our hopping mad bad guy pursues the pooch and fires a couple of shots at the thieving canine that eventually discards the commander's leg. One incredibly schlocky line of dialogue goes something like this: "You're too beautiful a woman to be a sadist." Our never-say-die heroes embark on a journey of hardship, lessened somewhat when Mark Banner unveils a motorcycle powered by crystal fuel cells (this bikes smokes horribly) and it comes equipped with a powered para-sail that turns it into a flying motorcycle, armed as the case is with rockets. Probably the most incredible feat occurs when our hero rides his bike across a gorge on one flimsy steel cable. Like the other commentators have observed about "Gold Raiders," it suffers from poor dubbing. When I mean poor dubbing, not only do the lines rarely match the mouths, but virtually everybody sounds like they were dubbed by people of an entirely different nationality, making the lines doubly incongruous. A Filipino guy sounds like an American golf announcer with a deep, heavy accent. Improbable and sometimes bloodthirsty, "Gold Raiders" robs the bottom of the barrel. Truly, this is a movie that should be reserved for special occasions when you want to treat somebody to a genuinely rotten movie. Oh, yes, check out the phony looking fishing scene and the giant shark-like fish that the Filipino's fishermen harpoon.
Jonsi
This movie has got to be one of the worst films ever made. It's extremely poorly acted, the script just couldn't be worse - all scenes are ridiculously stupid - let alone all the dialogues, the special effects are as if they were executed by small children and so on. In fact I could go on pointing out its flaws for ages.But this film also is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. It is one of the best - if not THE best - "so bad it's good" films I have ever laid my eyes on. I regularly watch it with my friends and we never tire of talking about it. No matter how often you watch it you can always find a new example of extremely bad film-making.Those who hate poor movies should stay far away from this one, but those who can laugh at all the catastrophe should definitely check it out. They won't be disappointed.I can't give this film more than 2/10 although it is as funny as I have described. I would have given it 1/10 but the fun factor raised the grade. In my opinion it would not be fair to give it any higher a grade - no matter how funny it is - it is just so bad.
grimsi
This is the worst movie I have ever seen and that makes it also one of my favorites. Every single scene is so ridiculous that it becomes very, very funny in every way. This is also one of the first movies I bought because my friends and I could spend hours and hours watching it over and over again, analyzing it and laughing. I recommend it to everyone that would like to see a movie made by and with mistakes.