Rugged adventurer John Hamilton (a solid and likable performance by Michael Dudikoff) gets hired by a team of shady folks with assorted secret agendas to find a fabled lost city located in the Amazon. Things go awry when the search party stumbles across evil Nazi scientist Dr. Wolfgang Manteuffel (a nicely sinister portrayal by Robert Vaughn).

Adequately directed in workmanlike fashion by the usually more competent and on the money Steve Carver (whose other much better films include "Big Bad Mama," "The Arena," "An Eye for an Eye," and "Lone Wolf McQuade"),with an often sluggish pace, an overly convoluted script by Andrew Deutsch and Edward Sampson that gets bogged down in rather tedious talk, and infrequent, but still decently staged action scenes, this one has all the essential ingredients -- Nazis, a band of scurvy pirates, a tribe of deadly cannibals, plenty of treacherous back-stabbing characters, and a few okay plot twists -- to qualify as a possible contender, but alas the fairly tepid execution fails to make all these promising elements cohere into an exciting and satisfying whole. Fortunately, a fine supporting cast of reliable veteran thespians ensures that this picture remains watchable: Donald Pleasence as the shifty Heinrich Spaatz, Herbert Lom as the corrupt Colonel Ricardo Diaz, and L.Q. Jones as grizzled old rascal Eddie Hiller. Moreover, there's yummy distaff eye candy in the fetching forms of Sarah Maur Thorp as the sweet Anna Blakesley, Cynthia Erland as Spaatz's sexy secretary Maria, and Foziah Davidson as the tough Dalia. Both Avraham Karpick's slick cinematography and Sasha Matson's moody score are up to par. An acceptable diversion.

RIVER OF DEATH is an action-adventure movie which has a bit of an Indiana Jones vibe to it. It was shot by Cannon Films in South Africa, which stands in for South America. The story is once again about Nazis hiding out in the jungle, their characters represented by a couple of old-time actors, Donald Pleasence and Robert Vaughn, who are fun but underutilised. Michael Dudikoff is the hero of the hour, a guide and adventurer leading an expedition to hunt for a lost city, but feels a bit aimless in the role. Dudikoff shot to fame in the AMERICAN NINJA movies but outside of pure martial arts cinema he always seems to flounder a bit; the same was true of PLATOON LEADER. In any case, this film has nice locations and a bit of action here and there, but is otherwise overlong, plodding, and misses the mark more often than not.

I wouldn't be surprised if I were reading too much into it, but when I'm looking at a movie called RIVER OF DEATH, in which Nazi scientist Robert Vaughn wears a swastika armband on his white lab coat while shooting the nice SS officer, and adventurer Michael Dudikoff goes looking for a lost city only to find a secret Nazi city run by Vaughn, I stop to wonder if I'm looking at a burlesque. A very dry burlesque. With nothing funny about it. Even if it is based on a novel by the same title, written by Alistair MacLean.

When I write there's nothing funny about it, I mean there's nothing I laughed, smiled, or thought "that's funny" about. There are some things that other people might find funny, like the black-and-white-painted naked jungle ninjas, the wrestling dwarves, or the cabaret singer who croons a love song to a plastic skeleton like she's Marlene Dietrich seducing Emil Jannings. I wouldn't think to tell you what you find funny, and if you think this is funny, well, you're entitled to your own opinion.

And if you do, get away from me.