Matty revisits the directorial debut of the mighty Jim Wynorski and finds it almost as well-developed as the chests of its starlets. 

Guesting on Full Moon bigwig Charles Band’s short lived Freakshow podcast back in 2022, Jim Wynorski recalled how, after finishing his directorial debut, THE LOST EMPIRE (1984), he received an angry phone call from Russ Meyer. 

Meyer was adamant he was getting ripped off.  

Featuring Raven De La Croix — the chesty star of the sexploitation king’s 1976 romp, Up! — and laced with humour, idiosyncratic plotting, big boobs and an even bigger quasi feminist bent, The Lost Empire certainly possesses enough overlap to trigger a strongly worded cease and desist letter. Meyer, however, was just being precious. Whether he followed Wynorski’s output beyond this point is anyone’s guess. Had he, the snarling smut iconoclast would have realised that The Lost Empire wasn’t a cynical facsimile but the work of a neophyte auteur who happened to share similar aesthetic and thematic obsessions. 

Despite hustling for Roger Corman at the time of The Lost Empire’s making, heading New World’s marketing department and co-authoring Forbidden World (1982), Sorceress (1982) and Screwballs (1983), Wynorski’s inaugural helming gig didn’t occur under the B titan’s watch. Instead, the project was bankrolled by Henry G. Plitt: a decorated war hero and owner of the then-largest independent cinema chain in the U.S., Plitt Theatres. As Wynorski tells it, Corman hated The Lost Empire’s script. Plitt, though, determined it good enough to bankroll as a potential tax write-off — a fact Wynorski was wholly unaware of. The young maestro poured his heart and soul into the film. Fuelled by the fear that he’d never be allowed to direct again — a particularly funny notion one-hundred plus movies later — Wynorski packed The Lost Empire with everything he could. Ideas. Quirks. The proverbial kitchen sink.

Originally intended to be a 3D feature and supposedly titled to invoke The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and an incoming Raiders of the Lost Ark (1984), The Lost Empire was lensed over sixteen days in and around Los Angeles (including at studio space sourced from Corman) and gifted a stateside theatrical run via Plitt’s eponymous company. The film opened in Virginia on 4th May 1984 before moving to North Carolina and, by September, Georgia.         

Watched today, The Lost Empire plays like a manifesto. A punchy, grin-inducing entertainment, it’s laced with images, sequences, and flourishes that Wynorski would reuse, refine, and retool throughout the rest of his career. The plot — which Wynorski fashioned with input from frequent collaborators R.J. Robertson and Denetia Arellanes [1] — is akin to candy floss. Pitched as “Charlie’s Angels meets Enter the Dragon (1973)”, the convolution will rot your brain (something about a supernatural, cult leader-y sort training an army of buxom soldiers at his island fortress) but the dizzying mix of action, comedy, and mammaries hits a sweet spot.

Setting his stall out straight away with a lingering shot of a heaving cleavage, The Lost Empire’s tightly assembled intro — wherein a gaggle of masked ninja assassins ransack a jewellery store in pursuit of the film’s MacGuffin, a powerful gem called The Eye of Avatar — is rhythmically identical to the hot starts in Deathstalker II (1987) and 976-EVIL II (1991). The arrival of arse-kicking heroine Angel Wolfe (model, beauty pageant queen, and ‘80s TV bit parter Melanie Vincz) is essentially Wynorski demoing his later ‘Die Hard (1988) in a school’ caper, Demolition High (1996); the same kind of tongue-in-cheek, push-it-forward prattle that propels Transylvania Twist (1988) and The Return of Swamp Thing (1989) is present in totality; and Wynorski’s fascination with stock footage as a means to bolster his own material is embryonically teased through snippets pilfered from The Lost Empire’s spiritual successor, James Coburn starring Bond spoof Our Man Flint (1966).

A la peers Fred Olen Ray and David DeCoteau, Wynorski is seldom given credit for his visual prowess, and The Lost Empire ranks alongside The Haunting of Morella (1990) and the not-to-be-confused-with-the-‘82-flick Sorceress (1995) as his most visually ornate production. Naturally, the babe-loving maverick’s bountiful spread of bodacious beauties (Vincz, De La Croix, Angela Aames, and Angelique Pettyjohn among them) get the bulk of the attention, but the care and precision evidenced across the gliding dollies; the elegant matte paintings; and the wealth of explosive, splash panel close-ups is glorious. When The Lost Empire’s genius cinematographer, Jacques Haitkin, passed in March 2023, Wynorski was quick to draw attention to the genre specialist’s contribution to the film and his influence in the long term, noting that Haitkin subjected him to an invaluable crash course in screen direction, and imparted hints and tips as essential as the lunchtime seminar Corman treated him to a few days before his sophomore opus, Chopping Mall (1986), went before cameras.

[1] The much missed duo are billed as “creative consultants” in the credits. Another dearly departed Wynorski stalwart, Bob ‘Mr. Moderation’ Sheridan, served as a production assistant. Robertson and Arellanes succumbed to cancer on 8th April 1994 and 19th December 2016 respectively, and Sheridan died as a result of a stroke in spring 2014.