Catchy title belies the meagre production values and soap opera rendition concerning a woman (Morison) searching for her missing fiancé (Edwards) in the unforgiving jungles of Africa. A stern voice-over narrates the picture as the actors recount their experiences through flashback, which amount to piles upon piles of stock footage. There's a few well-orchestrated animal attacks (tiger, lion) and some sexual tension between leading man Lowery and Morison, while an elusive Amazonian woman (Moustafa) and the hunt for a murderous ivory smuggler spices up the adventure.Kudos to the animal wranglers who've done a pretty decent job with their charges, while the leads Morison and action-man Lowery, acquit their roles with melodramatic intensity. Undistinguished cast otherwise features familiar names Darby Jones in a bit part as a native chief, and Cay Forester as a leopard-skin bikini-clad maid to Moustafa, a very 'westernised' jungle monarch, but it must be acknowledged, not an especially fluent actress.Typical jungle frolic is a spear-chucking success on a B-grade scale, and while nothing too serious, possibly earns a cult credit or two for its absurd hokum, gloriously typified by its banal closing line "wild lifestyle? .. ha, you should see our nightclubs". Cut and print.

One of Edward Finney's most well-known films, Queen of the Amazons is the story of a young woman (Patricia Morison), her guide, father-in-law, an absent minded professor, a cook and a man scorned who all go on safari to hunt down her missing fiancé. The film includes a number of subplots ranging from the romance to murder mystery, and somehow, it is all linked up to illegal ivory smuggling. The safari, inexplicably, launches from colonial India, and the search takes up more than half the story.Most of the story is driven by transitional scenes between stock footage of African wildlife, jungle scenery and well-acted action scenes including animal attacks. The script, which takes on the responsibility for drawing everything together and driving it along, is not really up to the task. Dialog is used to establish virtually everything the stock footage can not. Besides the bland camera-work, the often laughable stock footage, and the over-taxed script, the directing and editing are good. There are a few continuity errors, but not as many as some reviewers have claimed. After all, this is Queen of the Amazons (who were written about by ancient Greeks 1500 years before Europeans arrived in South America) not "Queen of the Amazon" (a river named after the Greek stories). One, however, is worth watching out for. Pat Morison is examining some stock footage of African Savannah animals running away through binoculars. Just as she says "why are they running away so fast?" we see a herd of gazelles in the binoculars - running in very slow motion.The cast performs very well given the limitations of the script and story. The only acting disasters belong to the nevertheless likable Amira Moustafa (who had a remarkably short career). Many of the other actors were veteran character actors, or on their ways to becoming so.What the film fails to do, despite a fairly strong effort, is to generate any sense of drama or urgency. Nevertheless, it is not a complete mess, and the stock footage is actually quite nice!

I saw this film on the science fiction classics DVD set, but knew that there would likely not be much science fictional in it -- after noting that it also contains "prehysterical" women or the Sons of Hercules films. There was a "bugologist" and some lessons in anthropology, which were quite fictional, even some unexpected dancing and poetry. It was fun, if like me you happen to like these kind of movies with corny, old-fashion, happy endings -- especially after a hard day's work thinking. The monkey and the raven did seem to be the most interesting actors, especially the monkey.There is even a serious side. It certainly reminds one of how things have changed since then in that then it was against the law to sell ivory without giving the colonial power its cut, while now it's supposedly illegal to do so to anyone at all.

While it brought back memories of a Saturday matinée, after seeing this on DVD I asked myself now that I'm much older, did it mention "Amazons" anywhere in the film? Or for that matter "Amazon Queen"? -- I think they called her the White Goddess. Were there any Amazons, besides the title's maid, if you then count that as two? And doesn't it take place in Africa when it should be in South America? Did all this escape the screenwriter? This movie is obviously aimed at kids. But parents should have a little talk about geography and mythology after viewing this with them. Maybe that's a good thing. Anyhow, you can see why I gave it a 3.