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Archeologist David Hilton (Richard Cambridge) is asked to track down
his former mentor Kixley, who has disappeared trying to find the Eye of
Kali and the Idol of Evil, both of which combined would give
its owner ultimate (evil) power. He soon hooks up with Kixley's assistant
Lucy (Stephanie Elliott) and his favourite guide Jack (Neil Forrester),
and the three are off to a archeological dig somewhere in the country - a
dig run by dandyish Father Calvert (Eley Furrell) and his excavator Nixon
(Adrian Bouchet), who work for an anonymous benefactor and who are very
interested in keeping their dig guarded from preying eyes. Be that as it
may, Hilton has interpreted a map to the idol of veil his own way, and now
finds it no mile away from Calvert and Nixon's dig ... but in the
meantime, Calvert and Nixon's men have taken Lucy captive, and they now
torture the wherabouts of Hilton out of her. So pretty soon, both Hilton
and the idol are captured by Calvert and Nixon's men as well, but somehow
they manage to escape and even take the eye of Kali (which has for the
longest time been in Calvert's possession) with them ... to no avail
though, they are eventually re-captured, and are to be made the
idol-&-eye's first human sacrifice - by none other than Karen Kixley
(Tracey Sheldon), who has long killed her husband to get her hands on the
idol and the eye and the power that comes with it. However, in the
film's finale that shows the sacrificial ceremony, Hilton and Lucy manage
to turn the idol-and-eye against Karen Kixley by clearing their minds of
all hatred and this way having it backfire on her somehow - and in the
end, it's she who dies, and Hilton gets the girl (Lucy, in case you
wondered). Idol of Evil is somehow reminiscent of all
these adventure movies that were made around the globe in the early 1980's
to cash in on the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark - without
having that movie's budget of course, which means these films cut corners
wherever they could with sometimes charming, sometimes embarrassing
results. These were films that lacked proper special effects, some big
things like the end of the world were always fought out by no more than a
handful of men, and the heroes of these films, archeologists mostly, were
generally too young and too handsome for their roles. Likewise, Idol
of Evil does not have the budget to properly tell its story, and while
I'm not necessarily one to slam a movie for its budgetary shortcomings,
the lack of funds in this case at times painfully shows. And of course,
the film has a too young and too handsome archeologist as its lead
character ... That's not to say though that Idol of Evil is
necessarily a horrible movie, it does have a certain low budget charm, and
shows some of the inventiveness that comes with underfunded projects, but
a more budget-conscious script would have vastly improved the whole thing
...
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