HEFILM

Yes it's offputting to start with all the "white" actors playing Aztecs but once you get used to this the story is on the side of the Aztecs, not the Spanish and their Christian campaign is shown as a type of genocide which isn't what you'd expect, perhaps especially from DeMille.

The film is centered on the female who constantly drives the story. The final battle is pretty impressive,the final moment sappy, which in the face of tougher view seems more out of place.

The early section does get pretty slow but once you get through that it steadily builds. The costumes and sets are pretty impressive and get more so as it moves along.

It's hard to find a good version of this, the ones that seem to be around are all intertitled in French! So you have to put up with ready tiny subtitles in English.

First off this film has more style than I expect from John Farrow as a director, well photographed with style and camera movement. However the noir flashback structure and the various obvious Maltese Falcon knock off elements are pretty uninteresting this time around, pretty much every cliche you can think of comes up and seems to just get in the way of the real story starting. Much of the start is and a long long boat ride to Mexico. All these tiresome things, take up too much run time. Once the film finally gets to Mexico and some nice, but rather sparse, on location sequences it finally becomes interersting, as is the music by a Mexican symphonic composer. The actors do what they can with tiresome roles. Too bad they didn't actually make this mostly about the ruins and threat of ancient curses, which are pushed in all the promotional material for the film. Too bad the story doesn't do much with these possibly exciting elements. You could almost fast forward to when they arrive in Mexico and not miss anything.

I saw this as Graveyard in a mediocre copy. The thing is producer Kevin Francis, I'm told, won't allow these movie he produced to be released now. Turner is good so it Bates, but the ending confrontation really goes on and on and drags out so much that when the very appropriate ending comes it lacks the impact it should have. Perhaps part of the problem is the lack of music and too talky a finale. The story is more disturbing than scary but the beginning is really the best part, then after an unexpected kill the movie becomes slower and less interesting. Deserves to be seen and seen in better form. Of the three horror films Francis produced I'd put this in the middle, The Ghoul is worse, the final Werewolf film is the least original but the most satisfying.