Customer Reviews

Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Pretty standard movie for the era, involving brutal tortures of gold hunters in the opening scenes, the twisted, comical Spanish/Mexican general as the evil villian, "noble" savages, a lost inca temple, humor, a tough (and very plain) leading lady, an easy-going western hero, this is a Western adventure. Bar fights, stage coach chases, running out of ammo, snakes in tumble weeds hured at the enemy, neither nudity nor sex - wasn't anything new for westerns. Acting was sometimes cheesy, film was not always perfect but was okay, it starts as if it's part of a cliffhanger series ("Last time our hero...") and ends as one. Hard core western fans might want to give it a try and people wih simple tastes. I was tempted to give it 2 stars - it's pretty vanilla - but I don't watch movies I don't think I'll like.

I was expecting some lightweight piece of rubbish where I could switch my brain off for an hour and a half, and that's what I got. But I was also expecting to see a georgeous blonde babe strutting her stuff to make a worthy distraction. Unfortunately, that didn't really happen.

Laurene Landon might be a hottie, but you wouldn't know watching this. She spends most of her time striding around completely covered in a set of buckskins looking a bit like Doris Day, who I never thought of as a sex symbol. As I had been expecting (and I am not sure why) to see her strutting her stuff in some bikini/jungle girl outfit, this was a bit of a let down. In fact, that hope was my principal reason for watching it.

So what did I get. Basically, a second rate western, set in Mexico, in which some goodies and some badies ride around looking for some lost Inca gold. The plot was stupid, the humour was lame, the script was poor, the characters were two dimensional, the acting was inept,... Shall I go on? You get the point.

It isn't the worst movie I have ever seen by a long shot, but there a better ways to turn your brain off for a while.

The lovely athletic Blonde lead of this action/comedy/fantasy Western is Laurene Landon -- who does almost all her own feats, stunts and martial arts -- with force and skill, unarmed or armed. It seems to me that Laurene Landon stays in "Apache Amazon" character -- when she rides, hunts, shoots and battles like an "Apache Amazon" -- anywhere she wanders. She can be quite colorful, flashy and spicy -- but chooses to appear more plain-and-stoic [at least at first] in this show. If folks were raised by the Apache it also seems realistic that they keep their calmly stoic identity and persona -- especially away from tribal-home among outsiders. There really have been a number of cases where various outsiders [White, Brown or Black] have been adopted by American Indian Tribes and "stayed-in-character", even returning to their Tribe after straying outside -- like "Yellow Hair" in this movie.

I find this interesting movie to be dramatic, colorful, funny and, yes, very silly at times -- which I quite like -- expecting this of such a low-funded semi-comedy show. The movie-makers of "Yellow Hair" make great usage of lots of the folks and stuff from the movie "Hundra" by the same producer and also leading with Laurene Landon -- leading to better quality and quantity of production for the cost -- even tho the movie-settings and themes are quite different. Many of the actors seem to be having great fun -- especially the two leads -- "Yellow Hair" and "The Pecos Kid". I also like the variety of action-settings -- the combination of American Indian, Wild Western and Mexican themes and scenes with treasure-hunting and fantasy-mystery is very fun. In addition, there are a number of side-plots and actions to add some fun. So, I have to go against the other "foul-winds" [reviews] and blow my "fair-wind" of five stars +++

... you take a popular concept (in this case, Indiana Jones), fuse it with heaping helpings of spaghetti western trappings, and insert a Bo Derek-lookalike in the title role? Why, you get YELLOW HAIR AND THE FORTRESS OF GOLD, a lame, low-budget western from 1984 with a feeble grasp of any of the elements that made the Indy movies, or Italian westerns, popular in the first place.

Laurene Landon plays Yellow Hair, a young white woman who, as a young child, was adopted by an Apache tribe after she was abandoned (or something) by her birth parents. Yellow Hair grows up to be the toughest kick boxer of her tribe. We see her first as she's rather decisively beating up a young Apache brave. Then it's off to spring the Pecos Kid (Ken Roberson) from his cell in a Spanish fort commanded by an unfunnily effeminate Colonel Torres (Luis Lorenzo.) And then... but, heck, what does it matter? There's a missing gold nugget that has to be retrieved so Yellow Hair's adopted mother can die easy, a horn to be blown at the Canyon with No Echo, and a Man Who Knows to be visited.

If, as seems to be the case, YELLOW HAIR intended to repeat the breakneck pace and high humor of the Indiana Jones franchise, it fails miserably. True, the film moves from one adventure to the next, but there the similarities end. The pacing is leaden, the jokes feeble, and someone forgot to buckle the swash. There are a couple of interesting scenes - Yellow Hair and Pecos Kid being chased while driving a stagecoach comes to mind - but for the most part it's just an embarrassing copy of a popular formula.