My review was written in July 1986 after watching the film on MGM/UA video cassette.
Italian filmmaker Antonio Margheriti went to his favorite Indiana Jones clone well once too often and came up with "Jungle Raiders", a lowercase adventure pic filmed in the far east in fall 1984, with "Captain Yankee" as an alternate title. Cannon ultimately decided to send this pickup directly to the video cassette maret, as part of its deal with MGM/UA Home Video.
Film begins promisingly with a lengthy sequence directly aping the opening of "Raiders of the Lost Ark", as soldier of fortune Duke Howard (Christopher Connelly), a/k/a Captain Yankee, leads a dude through a rain forest to hunt in a boobytarpped cave for a golden idol, pursued all the while by natives shooting arrows. The dude even escape in a seaplane Indy might use, all before it's released that Duke and the natives have staged the whole incident to fleece another gullible tourist seeking high adventure.
Set per opening credit card in "Malaysia, 1938" (too bad the filmmakers didn't realized that the British colony called Malaya for decades to come), tongue-in-cheek story deals with Duke guiding a museum curator Yanez (Marina Costa) from Colombia on her quest for the fabled Ruby of Gloom. Repetitive incidents in caves containing lakes on fire and jousting with the local firebrand Borneo pirates pad out the dull running time until an obligatory cynical ending.
Although there is a requisite amount of chasing around, pyrotechnics and stunt work, "Jungle Raiders" is singularly unexciting and pointless. Even the expected supernatural content is absent, with the ruby turning out to be just a big stone suitable for chopping up in Amsterdam.
Cast is merely okay, with Connelly a colorless hero, Lee Van Cleef a minor guest star who dresses alternately in all-white or all-black outfits, Alan Collins the chummy sidekick for the nth time in a Margheriti film and Marina Costa simply along for the ride. Tech credits are acceptable., though the often jaunty musical score occasionally lapses into the same library music already used in Margheriti's earlier pic, "The Ark of the Sun God".
