Found by Jess Franco scholar Álex Mendíbil in the Filmoteca Española archive after being lost for forty years, this is pure joy on film.

Yolanda (Lina Romay, never more charming, vivacious or just, man, I want to hug her; just look at her in this cowboy hat in the movie and tell me that Jess Franco wasn’t a lucky man despite the trials of his life) has married a rich boy named Simón (Emilio Álvarez) for his family fortune and is on honeymoon on Banana Island, a place where dying men give them blank slips of paper covered with mysterious messages, treasure is waiting to be found, a gang can be summoned with a flute and oh yeah, a Franco-voiced robot shows up and threatens to murder people and self-destruct.

Also, somehow an adaption of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Gold Bug and has a lot in common with Is Cobra A Spy?

I can’t overemphasize enough how much this movie made me happy. Outside of Lina slipping out of her top a few times — la chica no puede evitarlo — this is as clean a Jess Franco movie as you’ll see, shot in gorgeous settings, filled with high adventure and always a laugh and smile. A movie that is trapped like a fly in amber, reminding one of youth, of spy action, of silly windup robots stumbling in and out of the movie.