This is one of the best BAD movies ever made. I mean REALLY bad. If you score the recently panned Charles Angels movies as a 1, this movie is a -100. But it is so bad it is hilarious, a guilty pleasure for lovers of movies unintentionally campy. There is so much eye-candy that diabetics need to take an insulin shot before watching. I also recommend turning on the mute button and just watching since the dialog is so badly written. I mean, to be fair, what guy can turn away from a topless Tawny Kitaen?

The director obviously had a lot of fun making this film. Just Jaecklin was previously credited with directing the original Emmanuelle, The Story of O, and Lady Chatterly's Lover. Leaving those classics behind, he has given us one of the worst spoofs of Raiders of the Lost Ark imaginable, but I may be giving him too much credit here. Nobody intentionally makes this bad of a movie, do they?

The film is based loosely on John Willie's sexy "Sweet Gwendoline" adult comic strip serialized in the amusingly erotic fetish publication "Bizarre" in the late '40's-early'50's. The original title was "The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline." In the books, the virginal heroine is constantly getting captured by the villains and making perilous escapes, but the real point of the comic and its sequels appears to be showing impossibly sexy women in bondage and sexy clothing. This film keeps the names of some of the characters, and puts the heroine into similar perilous predicaments, but basically the movie script, written by the director, goes its own way in theme and story, as if anyone is paying that close attention.

Gwendoline, played by Playboy model Tawny Kitaen (Bachelor Party), has escaped from a convent (really!) to find her missing explorer-father, who was last seen seeking an elusive and rare butterfly. With the help of a hunky wise-cracking mercenary guide named Willard (Brent Huff) and Gwendoline's faithful hand-maiden Beth, the three evade asian gangsters, river pirates, the most fake-looking alligator in movie history, a steamy and slimy jungle where everyone takes off their shirt to collect rainwater (no, I'm not making this up), and a race of bald albino natives, eventually the trio discover a steaming hole in the desert beneath which lies the Forbidden City of the Yik Yak, a race of Amazonian women who like to run around topless in leather thongs.

Stop snickering, it gets better.

There is bondage a-plenty, several girl-on-girl cat fights, and a chase scene with chariots powered by slave women where usually there would be horses. All three of our adventurers get captured, then escape, then get captured again, and escape, but nobody is really paying attention. Eventually we learn that the captured Willard will be punished by being forced to sire a new race of women warriors by having sex with his captors. Strange, he actually WANTS to be rescued! Internet rumors abound that there is fight footage missing on the released VCR version, a 3-way elimination match that leaves nothing to the imagination, but we are deprived of it in the version that was reviewed.

As the plot evolves to its inevitable climax (this word is not chosen by accident) Gwedoline and Beth rescue their man, the whole place collapses in an earthquake but Willard manages to save one of the rare butterfiles for Gwendoline.

Many of the actors obviously do not know how to speak English. Early in the film there are subtitles to tell us what the asian gangsters are saying, as if it matters. However, by the time we get to the Yik Yak everyone by our three adventurers seems to be speaking perfect English, except their mouths aren't. This reminds one of watching one of the old spaghetti westerns, but frankly, I think the male viewers will be distracted by all that skin and leather and won't care.

Director Jaecklin has desperately tried to meld a traditional "damsel-in-distress" movie from the `1930's with a "bondage and fetish" film from the 1980's, and the mix absolutely does not work. But again, viewers are probably going to be too busy laughing at the corny dialog, bad dubbing, and choppy editing to care about such things. Ed Wood would have been proud.