Part 1 - Hunters of the Golden Cobra (I Cacciatori del Cobra D’oro)

This gem (ha ha, get it! Okay, I’ll stop) was directed by the legendary exploitation filmmaker Antonio Margheriti (responsible for countless amounts of Italian B-movies from virtually every genre) and stars everyones favorite Italian cinema regular David Warbeck(The Beyond, The Black Cat). Warbeck plays Bob Jackson (wow, what a memorable, excitement-inducing name for an action hero!), an American soldier working alongside a British Intelligence agent, played by John Steiner (Caligula, Salon Kitty), to track down a rogue double agent who has stolen a priceless artifact, a solid gold statue of a cobra with jeweled eyes. Jackson follows the downed plane of the agent into the jungle, but is attacked with poisonous darts by the natives, and is only saved when a mysterious girl living among them spares his life.

Cut to one year later, when Captain Franks (the British agent) finds him living in the Philippines and offers him $20,000 to help him retrieve the cobra, which is now also being hunted by the evil witch doctor Seppura, whose followers worship it as a religious symbol. While preparing for their journey, Jackson also meets Greenwater (Luciano Pigozzi, under his more Anglo pseudonym Alan Collins, a Margheriti regular) and his niece Julie, who want to hire him to help find Julie’s twin sister April, who was lost in the jungle when she was just a child. Could she be the same girl who saved Jackson’s life from those vicious savages only a year ago? He’s undoubtedly determined to find out, as he and the others set off on their quest to find the cobra and the missing girl, facing all sorts of dangers, including Seppura’s merciless minions, along the way.

Although the plot may be thematically similar to an IJ story at times, the look of the film is more reminiscent of several genres that low budget Italian cinema is certainly no stranger to, Vietnam war stories (of which Margheriti had done several) and cannibal films. From the explosion filled air raid in the opening scene to the bloodthirsty natives with the lush, Filipino locale as a backdrop, it will all look familiar to any well versed fan of Italian exploitation (think Jungle Holocaust, but replace the copious amounts of blood and gore with some temple raiding action).

The fact that the film doesn’t really hold it’s World War II era setting (gee, where did they get that idea from?) very well doesn’t really hinder things much because it really has little to do with the rest of the story, aside from making it more Indy-esque. In fact, other than a few attempts to recreate that signature Indiana Jones style of humor (some well placed sarcasm and a few bumbling mistakes), a couple of double-crossing characters, and a temple with an awesome, lava spewing snake head carved out of stone (other than this, the film is unfortunately a little light on the booby traps), there isn’t much else pulled directly from the Indiana Jones franchise at all. I would almost classify Hunters of the Golden Cobra as more of a film “in the vein of” Raiders of the Lost Ark than a full on copy of it. But, in order to provide you with the closest comparisons possible, I’ve compiled a handy Indiana Jones trademark checklist to see how each film stacks up against its source material.