Identify this 80s movie featuring Indy-type blond heroine and... Aztecs?

May 23, 2008 1:30 PM

Back in the 1980s, I remember watching a bizarre sort of Indiana Jones-copycat treasure-hunting/western movie. It featured a young, blond Daryl Hannah lookalike and possibly Aztecs who liked to dip humans head-first in liquid gold before decapitating them. It was fairly violent stuff, and one scene had the characters being horrified when one of their comrades returned headless on a horse. The whole thing must have been somewhat tongue-in-cheek, however, because it ended with a humorous 70s-style montage that set up a (presumably fake) sequel with the blond girl as a butt-kicking Indy-type heroine. I am pretty sure it was made in the 80s, and I remember the dialogue as being English, but I could be wrong; all I know is that Bud Spencer and Terence Hill weren't in it. Ring any bells?
posted by gentle to media & arts (15 comments total)

Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold?
posted by GeekAnimator at 1:37 PM on May 23, 2008

I was also thinking Allan Quatermain. Both Indiana Jones and Quatermain are based on Sir Henry Rider Haggard's adventure stories featuring the fictional Allan Quatermain character.
posted by rokabiri at 1:56 PM on May 23, 2008

Sheena?
posted by remlapm at 1:57 PM on May 23, 2008

King Solomon's Mines?
posted by pwb503 at 2:53 PM on May 23, 2008

Sounds like something from Cannon Films, which produced a number of Indy ripoffs including Treasure of the Four Crowns.
posted by johngoren at 3:02 PM on May 23, 2008

Hm. The only part of Lost City of Gold? that sounds similar is the "dipping people in gold" part and the fact that Sharon Stone is blond. But nothing in the trailer looks familiar. Does it feature anyone being decapitated?

It's definitely not Sheena or Treasure of the Four Crowns.
posted by gentle at 3:33 PM on May 23, 2008

Jane and the Lost City?
posted by Z303 at 3:36 PM on May 23, 2008

Sadly, no. And I just watched a bit of Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, and it's not that one either.
posted by gentle at 4:23 PM on May 23, 2008

Firewalker or The Laughing Dead? The Laughing Dead has Aztecs, gold, decapitations, and a leading lady (Wendy Webb) that reaaaaaalllly looks like Darryl Hannah. She's a singer now.
posted by iconomy at 5:53 PM on May 23, 2008

Thanks, but I don't think so. I saw Firewalker as a kid, and it's the right genre, but that's not the one; and The Laughing Dead looks like a supernatural splatter movie.
posted by gentle at 6:18 PM on May 23, 2008

The Further Adventures of Tennesse Buck and The Fantastic World of DC Collins are listed on imdb as Indian Jones Spoofs from the 80s. They both sound absolutely horrible, but the reviews are amusing.
posted by iconomy at 6:48 PM on May 23, 2008

Romancing the Stone or Jewel of the Nile? The montage sounds like one of Kathleen Turner's novel scenes.
posted by gentilknight at 7:52 PM on May 23, 2008

Nope -- the "novel scene" in Romancing the Stone was about a cowboy resucing a Mexican peasant girl, and the Jewel Of the Nile one took place on a pirate ship.


....Wait, why do I know that?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:57 PM on May 23, 2008

I believe in the movie the OP is looking for, at the end of the film they kill someone and have to escape an Inca pyramid, but before they do the heroine sprinkles herbs on a dead warrior and cremates his body.
posted by parmanparman at 10:11 PM on May 23, 2008

It's not The Further Adventures of Tennesse Buck, The Fantastic World of DC Collins, Romancing the Stone or Jewel of the Nile.

From what I remember the main characters were running around in a desert-like mountain terrain. There are no junges that I remember, so Mexico or Peru or Africa sounds appropriate. So yeah, it could be have been an Incan pyramid, parmanparman.

At one point one of the main characters is captured by the bad guys (natives, presumably), hung upside-down and his head is slowly lowered into a vat of what I took to be molten gold. And I think that when he's pulled up again, his head is missing.

At the end, the heroine has to fight a bunch of people in what's either a small village or a farm or some sort of corral, then takes off on horseback. This is where the montage happens, with supposed outtakes from the next movie.

That's an unusual way to end a film, so it could mean that what I saw was a TV episode or pilot, but at the time it seemed like a comic device.
posted by gentle at 6:29 AM on May 24, 2008