User Reviews

A smorgasboard of James Bond, Italian western and nazisploitation that veers on the edge of being good but is let down by the terrible dialogue and the ineffective acting. It does have a baboon driving a tank and blowing people up and indeed a huge amount of explosions but it's a damp squib. It's difficult to know if it's a skilful spoof or just bad film making. Unfortunately our 'hero' Duncan Jax is completely uninteresting. The villain called 'The Baron' looked liked Orson Welles with an eyepatch but had none of Mr. Welles charisma. Or acting chops. The baboon played by Typhoon out acts the rest of the cast.

This is a sequel to 'Unmasking The Idol' with 'hero' Duncan Jax which I haven't seen which presumably is in the same vein.

As those who explore this website will know, the Indiana Jones trilogy has always been a favourite with me, and perhaps even more so the various rip-offs that followed in its wake in the 1980s, whether they be American-spawned, Italian or even Bulgarian. So it is with some delight and joy that I can exclusively report on ORDER OF THE BLACK EAGLE, one of the cheapest (although it doesn't reach the below-zero level of TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS, the only rip-off in 3D!) and tackiest rip-offs of the series, which also throws in some James Bond-style antics for good measure and delivers the action in a rip-roaring package of high cheese and poor acting. All this and a comedy swearing baboon sidekick named 'Boon'; it's enough to send the cheese factor through the roof.

The low-rent antics involve a squad of Neo-Nazis living in some plastic fortress in South America, presided over by a big Gunnar Hansen look alike with an eye patch to make him that teensy bit scarier. They plan to blow up some stuff with a new laser beam, you know the story, there's a race against the clock and only one man is up for the job: the absurdly-named Duncan Jacks, a sub-par and balding adventurer with a line in cheesy one-liners and tongue-in-cheek banter. Basically, Jacks assembles a team of mercenaries and storms the enemy fortress. Fleshing out the usual clichés, the team includes a big black guy who can kill baddies by punching them, a cowboy, a geeky explosives expert, and a deadly Amazonian woman who could give Grace Jones a run for her money, the latter played by Flo Hyman who died during production and thus who disappears near the end of the film. The acting is generally awful but entertaining, and there's the usual quota of attractive top-heavy warrior women lurking around to make things easy on the eye for male viewers.

Most of the action is saved for the film's extended finale, which is highly entertaining to watch. Basically it consists of dozens and dozens of enemy soldiers being killed RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II style, with the method of death largely consisting of stuntmen getting repetitively blown up by big explosions, something which happens too many times to count. There's also a tank with a shark face painted on it, steered by the Baboon (!), a Japanese scientist who models himself on Q, and a guy who melts his arm to destroy the world (you'll have to watch it to see what I mean). The film is quite gory on the violence front, with plenty of bloody squib hits and one of those cheesy (the film SCREAMS cheese!) motorbike decapitations by wire that gets way overused. However, my favourite element is Adolf Hitler's cryogenically frozen corpse, which is used as a prop throughout and lies around in a glass case before our hero smashes said glass, causing the body to melt in a welter of gore and bursting skull fragments. The only way this film could have been bettered was to have Hitler come alive at the end for a one-on-one punch-up with our hero; then, we would have absolute perfection in terms of entertainment. As it is, this tacky and tawdry outing is still highly entertaining for lovers of camp action flicks.

It's pretty clear that "The Order of the Black Eagle" was trying very hard to emulate the James Bond movie series, to put it mildly. There are high tech gadgets, a madman planning to conquer the world, and a secret agent hero who plays the ladies and spouts out the occasional wisecrack, among other striking similarities. Unfortunately, the movie in the end can't measure up to even the lesser James Bond entries. It does get high marks in one area, however. While the movie was saddled with an extremely low budget and was helmed by independent filmmakers from South Carolina, the scale and production values actually aren't bad for a movie made under those circumstances, from the sets to the costumes. Clearly some serious effort was put into the movie to give it a strong visual "oompth".

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is more James Bland than James Bond. The action sequences are routine at best despite the many explosions and bullets that are fired. And the character of secret agent Duncan Jax - the center of the entire movie - is without spark. Actor Ian Hunter (who disappeared after making this movie and an earlier Duncan Jax movie) doesn't show much enthusiasm, possibly because the direction and writing don't give him much opportunity to make a good impression.

This isn't the worst James Bond imitation I've seen, but there's very little in it to make it stand out and grab a viewer's attention. The only people who might find the movie of interest are those who wonder what an "R" rated James Bond movie might be like. Though to be honest, by today's standards the movie would almost certainly get a "PG-13" rating at most.