Malaysia, 1938. Duke Howard (Christopher Connelly) also known under the delightful moniker of Captain Yankee pays is bills by conning Western millionaires into financing not all that dangerous adventurous expeditions full of events Disney World would be proud of. As the Captain sees it, nobody gets hurt: the rich have the adventures of their lives and himself, his friend Gin Fizz (Luciano Pigozzi; a better alcoholic Scot than that Connery guy could ever dream of) and a local tribe that plays the evil howling natives for them make a nice living. Alas wonderful arrangements like that don't last forever. Just back, he helps a woman called Maria Janez (Marina Costa) escape a handful of crooks that tries to kidnap her (queue fruit cart and cardboard box destroying car chase here), only to be brushed off when she hears his name. He doesn't know yet that she is a) the woman of his dreams and b) working for a museum in search of the mythical Ruby of Gloom. He also doesn't know that she is the person his friend Warren (Lee van Cleef) has just blackmailed him into playing the guide for in a real adventure.
How adventurous, you ask? Well, there are a few other groups interested in the Ruby - the usual types, like the hidden guardians every artifact must have and the Borneo Pirates under their leader Tiger, who plans on using the Ruby to help him get crowned as king of Malaysia (nope, I don't know why he needs the ruby for that) and who has bought the help of the local weapon smuggler Da Silva and a group of quite unimpressive mercenaries. I see lots of explosions in Captain Yankee's future.
Antonio Margheriti has a big place in my personal pantheon of Italian B-movie directors. A film like this doesn't make this place smaller. In part an Indiana Jones rip-off, a comedy that has a lot of fun with some genre clichés and a series of explosions (yeah, the Ruby is buried under a volcano), Jungle Raiders certainly is a lot of fun. The actors seem to be having a lot of fun, the tone stays mostly on the light side and the humor is (to my great surprise) actually funny. Margheriti's usage of genre standards is actually a lot more interesting than what the gentlemen Spielberg and Lucas did; especially when some of the racist underpinnings the Indiana Jones films just repeat are nicely deconstructed.
This being an Italian action movie, there are of course moments of pure idiotic genius, most of them backloaded into the last third of the movie. Personal favorites here are the caterpillar/tank with flamethrower approved embrasures and Lassie the cobra who gives Wonder Dog Moti a run for his money (and gets to slither into the sunset with a lady cobra, oh yes!).
And the best thing? This isn't even Margheriti's best adventure movie.
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