Director: Gianfranco Parolini
Year: 1964
Country: Italian
Rating: 4.0
Aka -
Die Diamantenhölle am Mekong
Aka - La sfida viene da Bangkok
Someone actually takes credit for writing
this script. He has no shame. A lot of the Euro genre films of the 1960s
leave you scratching your head at the gaping plot holes, but this entire
film feels like a gaping plot hole. It makes no sense which is a shame because
the production quality is pretty good and it has three male actors who show
up in a lot of these films. And it is shot in Thailand - partly out in the
jungle but a good chunk of it is shot in Bangkok with temples often in the
background and in one shot the Grand Palace. The good old days when you didn't
get stuck in traffic jams for hours. But oh, just to have a script. I would
bet they made it up by the day after a night of drinking.
A large number of diamonds are coming on
to the market from an unknown source, so the Diamond Association sends a
man out to Bangkok where they think they are coming from. At the airport
though their man is kidnapped and Horst Frank takes his place. A journalist
also going to look for the diamonds notices this switch but he (Paul Hubschmid)
says nothing. There is a diamond mining secret place being run by a cruel
and merciless white guy (Gianni Rizzi) who keeps killing his employees for
the hell of it. One poor guy gets bad news on the wireless and Rizzi knocks
him over and lets out a poison snake on him. Just because he got the bad
news. Not surprisingly, these employees aka slaves keep trying to escape
and he guns them down. On the outside the Yellow Tiger keeps stealing these
diamonds once they leave the camp. With a name like the Yellow Tiger you
expect a Fu Manchu character with his ornate lair - but he is just a white
guy in a straw hat who has no lair or much of an organization. A low budget
villain.
There is of course a bar scene but not much
of one. A wealthy dizzy woman from Connecticut is harassed by a table of
Thai men and Brad Harris comes to her rescue and clocks them all. None of
them would be mistaken for Tony Jaa. She (Dorothee Parker) hires him as her
bodyguard. She has a butler who tries to do his best Eddi Arent imitation.
Both she and the butler are annoying and serve no purpose in the film. All
these characters end up going to look for the diamond mine. Which may sound
fine but it is so incompetently done - there is a big shootout in which no
one gets hit, there is an elephant stampede of stock footage for absolutely
no reason, they manage to dodge bullets shot at them from ten feet away and
so on. This misbegotten film was directed by Gianfranco Parolini who actually
directed a ton of these genre films - often under the name Frank Kramer.
Lots of Euro-Spy films (Kommissar X), a few peplums, a few Westerns (Sabata,
Sartana) but something went very wrong here.
