Quest for the Lost City Reviews

A wan effort to do high adventure on a budget that wouldn't cover a public-school field trip, QUEST FOR THE LOST CITY (retitled from THE FINAL SACRIFICE) finds youthful Troy McGreggor (Bruce J. Mitchell) discovering the secret map that got his archaeologist father killed seven years earlier. Directly he's attacked by a dozen or so gunmen in dark T-shirts with black pillow cases over their heads. These are the dreaded Xeons, a rather down-on-their-luck master race who dominated ancient North America. Their leader Satoris (Shane Marceau, growling his lines in a vaudeville bad-guy accent) can take over the world if he performs the proper sacrifice at a nearby papier-mache altar. Troy gains an ally in Rowsdower (Christian Malcolm) a drifter who by an amazing coincidence--one of many to keep this plot jerking along--is a disgruntled exile from the villain's bloodthirsty cult. When Troy shoots Satoris to save Rowsdower, the Mayan-looking lost city of Ziox ascends from beneath the ground to the stars. Or somewhere, anyway; cheap visuals consist mainly of the two heroes gaping skyward. Filmed in the unexotic woods of Alberta, Canada, the feature has the amateurish ambiance of a class project, with a grandiose musical score that painfully emphasizes the threadbare quality of the material. The 1991 feature was released to home video in 1994. (Violence, profanity.)