In 1983, when House of the Long Shadows came out, it was heavily panned by critics of the time as being derivative of the old film “Seven Keys to Broadpate”, that the ending undermined the story, and it didn’t have much for scares. I would argue that the critics of the time were simply not picking up what this movie is putting down.
There will be spoilers below the cut.
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River of Death is a movie Cannon films picked up in the very late ‘80s, when they were kind of on their last legs, and trying to get by through doing the things that made them successful – capitalizing on other studios successes with low budget films (or optioning films at low cost) that had a similar vibe to them as other successes. In this case, going off of the success of Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, by optioning a movie that was already under production that had a similar adventure theme. Instead of returning to the Allan Quatermain well that they’d visited twice before, this time they went with a jungle adventure film based on a novel by Alastair MacLean, the author of Guns of Navarone.
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Going into this film, it’s important to note that this is a Ninja film released in the early-to-mid 1980s (depending on how you look at it), from Cannon films, and starring Sho Kosugi. That, out of the gate, implies a certain level of camp to the film. That said, Cannon films operates at a couple different levels – fun dumb, and then just dumb. So, the question then becomes which kind of dumb is this film? Continue reading
