Treasure of the Four Crowns

J.T. Striker (Tony Anthony) is an adventurer / fortune hunter hired by his associates Edmond (Gene Quintano) and Professor Montgomery (Francisco Villena) to get his hands on the legendary Four Crowns, which when obtained can make a person all powerful. This he has to do because diabolical religious cult leader Brother Jonas (Emiliano Redondo) is using them to control his mindless flock. To accomplish his task, J.T. gathers together a bunch of his old friends: the weary old Socrates (Francisco Rabal), the drunken Rick (Jerry Lazarus), and the super sexy Liz (Ana Obregon).

You know you're in trouble when the opening "Star Wars" style crawl is sorely lacking in any sort of punctuation. This basically amiable movie, rushed into production in order to cash in on the success of the previous Cannon Group 3-D feature, "Comin' at Ya!", is entertaining in spurts. Its extreme crudeness and cheesiness (one can clearly see the strings that are manipulating objects) could have been forgiven if only the movie had more energy. It moves along much too slowly, and there's overkill in terms of exposition. The acting from most of the cast is pretty bland. The filmmakers thrust as many objects into the camera as they can.

Helping to uplift "Treasure of the Four Crowns" (starting with that title, it's all too obvious which hit movie was a big influence on this one) to a degree are its WTF moments, its admittedly amusing opening set piece that goes on for over 20 minutes without dialogue, its absolutely priceless climax, and a wonderful, stirring Ennio Morricone music score that truly deserved a better movie.

This just isn't as much fun as this viewer would have liked.

Five out of 10.

Ok this movie is a ripoff of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and yes it's a very cheap movie, filmed with the worst lens, and film stock they could find, and yes you can see the strings, and yes lots of things don't make sense, but if you just watch it and try not to take it seriously it's actually pretty good.

The first 22 minutes of the movie is a bizarre take on the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, filled with traps, birds, dogs, ghosts, and lots and lots of fire. Yes none of it makes sense, but it's also kinda awesome, and there isn't a single line of dialogue the whole time which makes it even better.

After that people do start talking and we are given the basics of the plot, where are protagonist, whose name is JT Striker, is tasked with retrieving two of these four crowns from an evil cult leader who plans on using them four evil. Then along with four other accomplices Striker infiltrates the cults castle compound.

Now the movie is actually acted fairly well, and as a heist movie it's pretty good, it's only with the supernatural stuff does the movie go really off the rails. But even where it gets weird and crazy it's enjoyable for the simple WTF factor. Things are flying at the screen, there's fire everywhere, and yes you can see all the strings but it's still awesome.

The movie is fun if you just let it be fun and not expect much out of an Italian knockoff of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I remember this movie coming on numerous times on HBO and Cinemax when I was a kid and I watched it every chance I could. I know now that it was a cheesy movie and if I watched it again it would probably be not as good as I remembered, but I did like it when I was a kid. Sure most 3-d movies do the hokey sticking stuff in your face routine, and this movie is no different, but I still enjoyed it. Even though during one scene of the movie you can see the string on the "flying" key. The parts I enjoyed most are the first and last parts of the movie. The lead guy in the first part has to get through various traps to retrieve this key thing. I always love boobey traps. The middle just consists of him recruiting people to help retrieve the two crowns. Then it is like a spy movie as they break into some cults palace that has numerous traps. And yes there were only three crowns, one only had paper, the other two had gems, the forth one supposedly was broken by someone who tried to open it without the key. I don't think this was in the original foriegn version. I think it was mentioned only because Treasure of the Three Crowns just doesn't have the same type of ring to it. In the end many of the characters die, and perhaps they get the stones or not...I would say but I don't want to spoil the really dumb ending.

Watching this movie in the theater as a teenager with my friends was great fun - we howled and made fun of the film all of the way through, which was okay because everyone in the room was doing the same thing. That should tell you just how bad this movie is: so bad it's good. The thing is, I think the people responsible for this trainwreck meant for it to be a serious action film. Well, they didn't succeed. Instead what we got was really fake-looking special effects, bad acting and a story that barely held together. Other than the fact that the film is laughable the only reason to watch it would be to see Anna Obregon, the Spanish beauty.

No matter how you put it, this movie was created to contain as many gimmicks as possible to exploit the 3D theme. And as such it succeeded beautifully.

I have seen this movie when I was 13, close to when it came out.

Little other movies of the 80s have made quite the same impact. No, it's not a good movie by normal standards. But Yes, this is probably the best 3D movie ever made, and as such is worth a couple of lines in someone's book.