Treasure of the Four Crowns

I remember this movie being shown endlessly on HBO on Saturday afternoons in the 80's. Clearly trying to cash in on "Raiders of the Lost Ark", the only thing this film had going for it was the 3D and this is sadly missing on the video version. Strings are completely visible, repititous scenes of objects being poked at the camera and bad dubbing make for a difficult watch. Too bad MST3K didn't get a hold on this one.

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.

When I was a kid, I saw this movie and I loved it. I thought it was one of the best movies I'd ever seen. Ten years later, I picked it up at the video store to take another look.

Ouch.

OUCH!

This is a bad movie! Really bad! Cheesy, badly dubbed, almost everything is done badly. Love those wires on the "floating" key! The climax is hilarious!

One good thing about the movie: Ever reliable Ennio Morricone gives the movie a good score.

I could see the producers showing this to investors and saying "this is the future of movies". It's kind of overdone, like showing the most extreme examples of the 3D effect really getting in people's faces. That, seemingly, is the only reason for it's existence. It was part of a short revival of the 3D process, and i remember seeing it in a theater and thinking at the time how cool it was.

What's the plot? Well, a guy in a red windbreaker walks around and does some "treasure hnting" stuff, while things pop up at him (and us) in a vaguely surprising way. There really isn't any other plot than that. It could be argued that it was based on the popularity of "raiders of the lost ark", but you could actually argue just as convincingly that it's based on "the ghost and mr. Chicken". Recommended just for the flat out gimmicky-ness of it.

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.