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Best movie ever!

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Hilarious mess based on a Harold Robbins novel. It starts in 1945 in the (fictional) South American city of Corteguay. A young boy named Dax sees his dog shot dead in front of him. Then he sees his mother stabbed to death and his sister raped and murdered. He then shoots to death several men responsible. He goes to another place and everybody there gets murdered too! This is all in the first 20 minutes--and the film runs three hours! Eventually Dax escapes to Rome with his father. He grows up and is played by that international star (cough cough) Bekim Fehmiu. The rest of the film follows him through his life and his frequent sexual couplings and desire to help Corteguay.Wow--what a disaster! To say this is bad is putting it mildly. It's incredibly stupid but keeps throwing in so much sex, nudity and violence that you're never bored. Some of the things here are so badly done they boggle the mind. At one point Dax is romancing a young woman (Candice Bergen looking so young and beautiful) but the montage of the two of them falling in love is so clichéd it's hilarious. Then there's the scene where they first make love--with actual fireworks bursting overhead! There's a hospital scene between the two of them that was so stupid I actually laughed out loud! There's a fashion show about two hours in that's a real eye popper. Most of the dialogue sounds (and looks) badly overdubbed. Old pros Ernest Borgnine, John Ireland and Olivia deHavilland are shamefully wasted but still manage to give good performances despite the script. Leading man Fehmiu is (to put it mildly) a bad actor. He's totally expressionless throughout the whole movie. He's also ugly and not in good shape at all.There are a few good things about this movie. The location shooting in Rome and South America is just great--there's some beautiful locations and cinematography here. Fehmiu aside everyone else gives pretty good performances. There's also some cool battle sequences too. As a serious movie this is a disaster. But, as camp, it's a laugh a minute! This was originally R rated mostly for the frequent female nudity. It was reissued a few years after its initial release and was cut to get a PG. The DVD says it's the PG version but it's not. The PG version runs 170 minutes--the R rated runs 177 minutes and that's the one on the DVD. Worth catching for laughs.

Except for the color cinematography of Claude Renoir, this sprawling story of a selfish playboy son of a South American diplomat who has been murdered, is nothing more than a revenge story told on a scale that would be impressive if the story was worthy of being treated as an epic. There are huge crowd scenes, many explosions, awkward love scenes, terrible dialog and just a few moments where you can see an occasional moment of truth.All of the actors are pretty well wasted and only occasionally is there a flash of good acting. The hero is played by BEKIM FEHMIU, a lean and muscular leading man who has only one expression no matter what the circumstances. His wooden performance seems to have affected everyone else in the cast, with the possible exception of OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND and JOHN IRELAND who at least acquit themselves without looking foolish.There's also a charming performance from LEIGH TAYLOR-YOUNG, but CANDICE BERGEN, ROSSANO BRAZZI, FERNANDO REY, ERNEST BORGNINE, ANNA MOFFO and others do nothing that raises the level of the film to anything more than pulp trash--which, considering that it came from a Harold Robbins novel, is all that it could ever hope to be.The striking photography cannot be praised too highly, but everything else crumbles under the heavy-handed direction of Lewis Gilbert. He never manages to make any of the characters appealing enough to really care about.Summing up: At your own risk.

A real treat...if you're a masochist. Bekim Fehmiu is "Dax," the son of a counter-revolutionary from a fictional South American country who beds loose women, rich women, elderly women, and so on. All done in the name of keeping his homeland free from tyranny. In addition to Fehmiu, whose career seems to have evaporated, THE ADVENTURERS features the likes of Candice Bergen, Charles Aznavour, Olivia De Havilland, and Fernando Rey, all at their very worst. Ernest Borgnine, with jet-black hair and frito-bandito accent, plays Dax's bodyguard. Every lurid cliché in the book is assembled for this trashy adaptation of the Harold Robbins novel: murder, rape, assassination, lesbianism, miscarriage, adultery.

I had read Harold Robbins' book "The Adventurers" on a cross-country flight when it first came out, and found it to be a bit more enjoyable than his usual trash--somewhat better written, a more interesting story than usual, different types of characters. So when the movie was released, I figured, "Ah, what the hell, I'll check it out." I must say that I enjoyed this film in spite of itself. The dialog is laughably inane, the acting by pretty much the entire cast is abysmal (star Bekim Fehmiu, a Yugoslav heartthrob, only made a few more films before he deservedly disappeared), if you expected Candace Bergen to do her usual embarrassingly inept job you won't be disappointed, Ernest Borgnine hams outrageously, and there are a host of cameos--none of them particularly noteworthy--by everyone from Olivia De Havilland to John Ireland, most of whom probably took the parts in order to get a free trip to Europe. The film does, however, have a few things going for it. One is the luminous Leigh Taylor-Young. She is absolutely exquisite; her part, though essential, doesn't call for a lot of screen time, but every time she does appear on-screen she lights it up. Also, the battle sequences are exciting, well staged and very convincing; they pick up the film's pace tremendously (the action scenes were shot in Colombia and the extras were Colombian soldiers, who knew a thing or two about what happens in battle). A lot of money was spent making this picture and, unlike many big-budget European co-productions made at the time, it shows on the screen. The photography is outstanding, the European scenery is beautiful, the jungle scenes in "Corteguay" (which were also shot in Colombia) are stunning and the costumes and production values are sumptuous. Besides, it IS an interesting story (the son of a man murdered by a corrupt and oppressive government returns to overthrow that government, only to find that the new government he's helped to install is just as corrupt and oppressive).All things considered, it's not a bad way to spend a couple of hours. The picture got savaged by reviewers when it first came out, but it's really not all that bad. It's somewhat overblown and overheated, but enjoyable nonetheless. Check it out.