1982, Spain/United States. Starring Tony Anthony, Lewis Gordon, Jerry Lazarus, Ana Obregon, Gene Quintano, Francisco Rabal, Emiliano Redondo, Francisco Villena. Directed by Ferdinando Baldi.

All the films that fall into that general category of "cool when I was in elementary school" have this common peculiarity. I, as well as most of the people with whom I saw them, remember one or two particular scenes from each movie, and not much more up until we start watching again, at which time the floodgates of memories both shameful and grand are thrown open. With Sword and the Sorcerer, for example, everyone remembered the slimy wizard making the witch's chest explode, and everyone remembered the steamy bathhouse scene, but not much else. In the case of Beastmaster, another classic from a bygone era, we each remembered some green guys who wrapped their leathery wings around people and dissolved them, and we remembered Tanya Roberts bathing nude under a waterfall. In Revenge of the Ninja it was a tremendous spray of blood as Sho Kosugi kills the villain at the end, and two naked people getting killed in the middle of having sex in a hot tub.

There may be a pattern here. I'm not sure.

In the case of the oft-forgotten Indiana Jones rip-off, Treasure of the Four Crowns, all anyone could remember was "something about a lot of flaming rocks swinging around on really obvious wires."

There's a good reason this is the thing we all remember. We remember it because nothing else really happens in the whole damn film. Sure, it claims to be action-packed, in the tradition of course of the recent hit Raiders of the Lost Ark, but unless you count among the action sequences the scenes in which a middle aged man struggles to grab hold of a floating key that makes electronica music play, then the truth is that action scenes are few and far between. Specifically, there is one at the beginning of the film, one at the end, and neither are really worth a damn for anything beyond the sheer hilarious incompetence on display.


Although few people seem to remember this little gem of a film, and by gem I mean small chunk of gravel, it caused a minor stir upon its initial release, and I have fond memories of the day we all loaded up for our friend Jason Morgan's birthday party (I think it was his) after school and went to see this film, which aside from promising us nonstop action both bigger and better than what we'd so recently enjoyed in Raiders of the Lost Ark, was also shot in glorious 3D!

It's always disappointed me a tad that the 3D trend hasn't been revived. Oh sure, you can pay $700 to go to an amusement park where one of the shows is a 3D feature with someone like Rick Moranis or Eric Idle in it, but those are isolated instances in specialized circumstances. Back in the 1980s, let me tell ya, we knew how to live. Sure our music sucked and we all wore those tan Bass dress shoes with the backs squashed down for no real reason. Sure, we made stars out of Nu Shuz and Rockwell, but we also braved bold, new paths forever etched in the annals of history. One of the biggest was probably the flight of the first space shuttle, but only slightly below that in terms of global impact was the explosion in the popularity of 3D movies that failed miserably to be good movies or look very 3D.

I can't remember if the trend started on television or the movie houses, but my first 3D memory was the groundbreaking broadcast of Creature from the Black Lagoon in dramatic 3D. You had to go down to the local Convenient food mart (now called something else, I think) where you could get a free pair of the red and blue cardboard glasses that sawed into your ears. Then you, your family, and your friends could all huddle around the television and watch this historic event. It's weird in this day of twenty-four hour media saturation, to think of anything on television being a national event, but these were simpler times. When a miniseries like The Day After promised to blow our minds, the nation ground to a halt in order to watch. It's a curious thing I don't think could be recreated today. Sure, there were lots of people excited about the final episode of Seinfeld, but it just wasn't the same.


The biggest thing I remember about that night spent watching Creature from the Black Lagoon in dimension-bending 3D was how amazingly un-3D it looked. For starters, it aired on local channel WDRB-TV 41. This was a time before cable, so we all had to struggle with the rabbit ear antennae as best we could. The end result was that there was no such thing as a clear picture, at least not on a local independent channel like 41. Thus much of the potential 3D effect was no doubt watered down by the snow and occasionally weak and wavy signal. Plus, the 3D technology just sort of sucked.

But it was still sort of cool, so they did it again a little while later with that movie about the gorilla that escapes and spends a lot of time reaching at the camera. Now, I know many of you out there are younger than me and can't clearly remember a time when gorillas were terrifying beyond the scope of mere words. But for those of you as old as or older than me, you remember - if you dare. Rampaging gorillas were a huge deal back then, though not as much so as they had been in the 1940s when every other movie featured the Bowery Boys and Bela Lugosi being chased by a gorilla and every other television show was another episode of The Little Rascals in which Spanky and the gang try to scare Buckwheat with a fake gorilla, only a real gorilla escapes and causes all sorts of hilarious escapades. If it wasn't that episode, then it would be another one where they have to defend their fort from other kids by dressing up like pirates and flinging Limburger cheese at them.

I know it's a level of sophistication to which many of you young kids can't fully relate, and I pity you that the world has become so dumbed-down that it no longer appreciates the subtle humor of black guy whose afro stands up or a scene in which a drunk guy sees a gorilla run by him in downtown New York, causing him to look at his bottle of ripple, look at the gorilla, look at the ripple, then throw the bottle away as he proclaims, "I gotta lay off this stuff!" I weep for a generation that cannot see the humor in Ruth Buzzi's strained-voice, purse-swinging, crazy woman character.

Okay, so I crossed the codger line there. Even I didn't find Ruth Buzzi funny. I don't think anyone did, with the possible exception of the people on the Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, and they were all plastered anyway.

Existing parallel to the 3D rage on the television was a growing revival of 3D movies on the big screen. In the span of a few short years, or possibly even months, we were hit head-on with films like Spacehunter, Friday the 13th Part III, Weird Al Yancovich's ground-breaking In 3D album, and of course the film we're here to discuss today, Treasure of the Four Crowns. The main problem uniting all these movies was that, while every producer knew he wanted to cash in on the trend, no one really had much imagination when it came to taking full advantage of the potential of 3D effects. Thus you get scene after scene of a guy reaching toward the camera or pointing a speargun at the screen (I think that was done in all three films I mentioned). In the case of Friday the 13th Part III, it was especially sad how little they came up with. I mean, it's a movie about a crazed invincible killer, and besides being the movie that introduces the hockey mask (I think), the best 3D effects they could come up with were the chilling "here comes some popcorn!" scene or the shocking "Watch out! I'm doing yoyo tricks!" scene. Not exactly what fans wanted.

Pretty much every other scene in the action-adventure disaster that is Treasure of the Four Crowns involves a guy sticking something toward the camera in an exaggerated manner and for an unrealistically long time. Pretty much anything that isn't bolted down gets picked up and waved into the camera. Keys, sticks, guns, fingers, bottles of booze, skeleton arms, spears, dangling bits of string, even a squirrel. You name it, and someone held it in front of the camera in a very unnatural looking way. It is, in many ways, the least ludicrous thing about this movie.

The movie opens with Star Wars like scrolling words on a space background. They explain to us that some things, like this movie, simply cannot be understood. These things include, aside from the movie Treasure of the Four Crowns, the actual four crowns, which contain gems that, when united by a man in a windbreaker, can either usher in an era of peace of prosperity or unleash a world where good is forever entangled in battle with evil, which I guess would be, well, the current world. I've never quite understood how a couple little gems or amulets or anything could usher in an era of anything. Just because you can shoot some animated beams out doesn't really translate into changing the world. Sure, both Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Lord of the Rings featured magic items with the power to change the world, but that was only if they were used as weapons by a guy who already had a pretty big army beforehand. If Sauron had just been some lonely wizard living in a cave, it's unlikely the One Ring would have changed much of anything, and if Hitler didn't already have his army in place, he wouldn't even be able to lift the Ark of the Covenant.

But, for the sake of this movie, let's assume that these jewels do have unspeakable powers. The opening narration then goes on to tell us that, even as we are reading this, a soldier of fortune is seeking out artifacts that will unlock the power of the crowns. That soldier of fortune, that man, is JT Striker.

JT Striker sounds like one of those TGI Fridays rip-off restaurants where you are served potato skins by an overzealous waitstaff all named Josh or Justin or Megan. In a way, this image is not so far off from the image we see of JT Striker, a rugged man of the world, an adventurer, rogue, international soldier of fortune who has come to raid an ancient castle while wearing a Members' Only jacket and a pair of Haggar slacks. I was immediately reminded of the "greatest athletes in the world" from Gymkata, most of whom were very pasty, doughy middle-aged guys in jogging suits who looked more like used car salesmen than they did the greatest athletes ever known to man. I would find, as Treasure of the Four Crowns progressed, that it in fact had far more in common with Gymkata than it did with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Sadly, in my twisted, sick universe, this is not necessarily a bad thing.


Anyway, JT Striker, exuding all the manly ruggedness of a guy who puts on a nylon warm-up suit and power-walks through the mall for exercise during his lunch break, is busy attempting to pick his way through a jungle cave filled with booby traps that result in a lame 3D effect at every step. Spears, vines, JT's ass and crotch, and at one point something resembling a squirrel, or possibly a woodchuck, gets thrust toward the camera to provide thrill-a-minute action. JT, of course, being one of the greatest soldiers of fortune ever to step out from behind the counter of a Rexall Drugstore, manages to evade even the deadly spring-loaded squirrel and soon finds himself shoving his crotch into the camera as he shimmies down a space-age looking corridor while weird Forbidden Planet type music plays. What the hell???

At the bottom of the shaft, he lands inside what looks to be the basement of one of those King Henry's Feast type themed restaurant where all the community theater people go on the rare days when a Renaissance Festival isn't within driving distance of their homes. I thought he was in a jungle just a second ago, but whatever. I suppose there could be castles full of medieval artifacts in the middle of the Amazon. Can you prove otherwise? Have you ever been on a treasure hunting expedition to the Amazon? Well, JT Striker has, and he didn't even have to buy safari clothes. He just wore some slacks and a red warm-up jacket. He didn't even bring a burro or treacherous Hispanic sidekick. Heck, he didn't even bring a sack or a backpack or anything.

The aim of his edge-of-your-seat adventuring is to retrieve a magic key that has a tendency to make electronic "whoo whee woo" music play as it levitates around aimlessly, causing things to blow up. Picking up the key triggers about a million booby traps, each one deftly foiled by Striker using the method known in the business as "dumb luck." Most of the booby traps cause something to fly toward the camera. Now, "seeing the string" is a staple of any bad movie filled with even worse special effects. We all know that there are multitudinous sci-fi films in which you can spy the wires holding planets and spaceships in place. Treasure of the Four Crowns takes this to a bold new level however by refusing to include even a single shot where you can't see the string that the various items wobble around on. You might be saying to yourself, "Yeah, but I bet it was less noticeable in 3D," and I would then have to laugh at you. Even as a ten year old who could be dazzled by something as obviously shoddy as Thundarr the Barbarian, seeing the historically incompetent effects in this movie truly astounded me. I mean, how many decades have they been doing the levitating shtick in movies? And they can't even get that right? Hell, I was able to do a better job in high school video productions we made for English and history classes.

It also causes a crossbow to levitate through the air, or at least to wobble precariously on the end of a wire. Striker chooses to stand motionless, directly in front of the crossbow, waiting until it begins to fire bolts at him before he dives to safety in the nick of time, providing us with much tension and rousing action, or at least an excuse to ask the question, "Why would anyone stand motionless, directly in front of a levitating crossbow?"

All sorts of stuff starts to explode while ghost noises tease us that the moldy old skeletons lining the walls will spring to live and deliver some serious undead action. Sadly, that is beyond the scope of the budget, so some of them just sort of fall over a little. Striker escapes out a nearby window, which begs the question why didn't he just come in that way to begin with instead of dealing with that out-of-place jungle cave full of traps? As he runs, or lumbers I suppose, over the lawn in dramatic slow motion, things blow up for no reason and showers of sparks rain down from strategically placed flashpots.

If there was any doubt that this movie would not live up to the promise of out-adventuring Indiana Jones, I think we had them addressed during that riveting opening action sequence, and I use the term "action" in the sense that it means a middle age man in Members' Only jacket running in slow motion through a field of exploding flashpots. Some people call that action. I call it a Billy Squires concert.


Back in civilization, which begs the question of just where the hell this castle was in the first place, Striker sells the key to the nutty Professor Montgomery, who does what all professors do in movies like this, which is rant incoherently about a relic possessed of unspeakable power. Basically, he recites that bit of scrolling text from the beginning of the film. You know, I may not have gone to Harvard or Oxford or Cumberland Community College, but I did go to college, where I took several anthropology and ancient history classes. At no point in my entire five years (switched majors a year from graduation), did I ever have a teacher who, on the side, quested after ancient relics of unspeakable power. In fact, they didn't even hire people to quest for relics, and with all due respect to Indiana Jones, I tend to doubt the existence of these adventuring professors who have magic amulets and scepters lying about in their office. Like I said, maybe I just went to the wrong university, because never did I have a class with a nutcase professor with some cockamamie theory about the lost Amulet of Zag-nalthriglil that would allow the possessor to conquer the world. I did, however, have a film theory teacher who used to jump up on the table during class and do suggestive interpretational dances to film noir music.

Montgomery uses the key to unlock one of the three sacred crowns. I know, I know. There are four sacred crowns. There's actually only three. One apparently got destroyed a long time ago, which would seem to render the whole threat of uniting the crowns somewhat moot. Inside the crown is a slip of paper. That's about it. Oh yeah, the key makes some stuff pop and fly at the camera because it's been a few minutes since anything was flung at us through the miracle of 3D technology.

The professor and his little buddy, an incredibly grating smarmy guy, want to hire Striker to obtain the other two crowns, which are in the possession of a really lame religious cult. Montgomery promises that those two crowns have treasures in them slightly more interesting than a scrap of old paper. Personally, I'm thinking the whole treasure of the crowns thing is going to be as anti-climatic as the safe of the Andrea Doria or Al Capone's secret vault.

Striker is apparently on my side, as he delivers the "bunch of superstitious mumbo jumbo speech" and combines it with the "I've got better things to do than get killed," though apparently he doesn't since when we first met him he was braving the menaces of a dead squirrel and a persistent buzzard. Some more swinging the key about on a string and the promise of a lot of money eventually convince Striker not to return to his job as manager of the Airway men's department just yet. And I say Airway because they didn't have Target back then.

To pull off this task, Striker insists on assembling his team of seasoned adventurers. First there is Rick, the alcoholic mountain climber. Here the movie really misses a golden opportunity to exploit the "drunken double take" joke of which I spoke earlier. Just as Striker is about to give up on the drunken Rick, the key starts doing that flying around thing. This scene goes on for what must be ten minutes, and it would have been a perfect opportunity to have Rick do the thing where he looks at the bottle then throws it away. Instead, Striker manages the awesome feat of eventually catching the slowly drifting key after a lot of stuff explodes, and Rick, figuring that this asshole just let a little magic key blow up his whole cabin, decides he's game for some adventure.

Next up is Socrates, who is working a shameful gig as a clown in some back alley vaudeville show. Like Rick, Socrates is initially hesitant to risk his life and give up all the prestige and public adoration that comes from being a clown in a failed vaudeville show. But he'll come along so long as Striker agrees to also put Socrates' dearest Liz in mortal peril as well. Liz, aside from being something of a knockout, is a trapeze artist.

So, the world is going to be saved from the clutches of an evil cult by a guy in a Members' Only jacket, a vaudeville clown, a trapeze artist, a drunk, and a grating yuppie. Oh, do I ever wanna get my hands on the guy who decided to entrust my fate to a washed-up clown!

This whole sequence has gone on for a very long time, and most of it has been comprised of scene after scene of the key flying around and making glass and steam fly toward the camera. The movie is well over halfway finished at this point, and we've had one dull action sequence, an abbreviated clown act, some goofing off on a trapeze, and a bunch of exposition and shots of a key levitating to and fro. Maybe the people who were going to out-adventure Indiana Jones missed the part where, by the halfway point, they'd had about a dozen fist fights, shoot-outs, car chases, sword fights, funny monkeys who do the Seig Hiel salute, explosions, a froggy looking guy named Toht, and we've been to America, Nepal, and Egypt. Somehow, Treasure of the Four Crowns' procession of scenes involving Striker attempting to convince a clown to help him raid this fortress aren't quite the same. Indiana Jones gets Sallah, a barrel-chested hero of a sidekick with a booming voice, while Striker has a guy who, on a good day, reminds you of some sleazy coke-snorting disco yuppie who drives a Corvette.

I mean, even Gymkata had a bunch of fight and chase scenes by this point. Sure they were lame beyond mortal comprehension, but at least they were there. Treasure of the Four Crowns is only a step above what real archeology would be like, which is sitting in a room reading books for two years before you go out to the Gobi Desert to brush rocks with a cotton swab.

But hey, now that we have the impressive action team assembled, I'm sure the pace will pick up. No wait, first they have to spend some time going over the various traps and security devices that pepper the cult's compound. The crowns are in a room protected by dozens of those laser beam security devices, a big metal cage, and a floor that causes a piercing alarm to go off if you so much as drop a feather on it. And then the statue upon which the crowns themselves rest is packed with assorted booby traps as well. Since they can't get in through the front door, so to speak, their only option is to use a series of ropes, pulleys, and trapeze contraptions to crawl across the ceiling! And luckily, Striker just happen to assemble a team containing a mountain climber and a trapeze artist. I'm not sure exactly where the aging clown with a heart condition comes in.


Then there's one of those scenes where the magic key flies around for about nine hours as everyone grimaces in slow motion as stuff explodes and flies into the camera. Apparently, this is how the movie defines scintillating action, but I guess I've been spoiled to the point where watching someone whiz a key around on the end of a string simply fails to impress me anymore.

While the leader of the cult holds one of those, "I shall heal this sickly woman" meetings to impress new recruits, Striker and his team go into action, or as much into action as this leisurely paced film will allow. It occurs to me that this cult doesn't seem especially interested in using the power of the crowns so much as they just like having them locked away in the big secure room for no real reason. It's not like they were actively trying to use the crowns for evil, nor were they actively pursuing the key that would unlock their allegedly awesome power. In fact, if Professor Montgomery wouldn't have started this whole mess up, it's probable that this cult would never to anything more dastardly than shanghai the occasional homeless guy and indoctrinate him to love "the master" as he wears a burlap sack and picks potatoes for the Rapture.

Tension builds to a fever pitch, or at least a slightly warmer pitch than it had been watching the key fly around, as Striker and his band evade the ninja guards in novelty masks and proceed to crawl very slowly across the ceiling, stopping occasionally to nearly fall or trigger an alarm so we get scenes of incredible nail-biting suspense, or at least a lot of scenes featuring middle aged guys hanging upside down and making "hyngg!" noises. They also scream a lot when they fall, which seems not so wise to do when a ninja in a funny mask is right outside the door feeling pissed that, while he does get to wear the cool ninja soldier outfit, he has to ruin it all because the cult leader insists on the stupid big-nose masks.

After about eleven hours of crawling around, Striker is finally in position to get the crowns. Then the old clown has a heart attack, which frankly serves Striker right for ever thinking that an old clown would be a good adventurer, and the drunken Rick is impaled by a bunch of spears that shoot up out of the altar in front of the crowns. Then some steam blows on Striker, and the alarm finally goes off after all this screaming and triggering of booby traps. The yuppie guy triggers yet another trap and is either bitten by a fake snake or impaled by a spear. Since whatever it is, is shooting directly at the camera in glorious 3D, it's difficult to tell. Then he gets crushed too! Man, that guy just had no luck.

As the ninjas and their leader close in, Striker unlocks the crowns and grabs the jewels, which causes lights to go off while his head spins round and round in a scene that literally had me falling off the couch with unbridled laughter. And from here on out, it only gets better. As I describe the finale, you will probably write me off as having dropped acid or had one too many warm cans of Michelob, but I assure you my sobriety was intact even if my sanity was not by the film's end.

The jewels flash various colors, and suddenly Striker turns into a hideously deformed mutant with gel oozing out of the side of his face. As he growls without opening his mouth so as to avoid dislodging the shoddy latex they slapped on his face, the jewels begin spewing flame! The ninjas try to mow the mutant Striker down with machine gun fire, but it has no effect, as he swings the flame around and cooks everyone. Then he makes giant flaming rocks fly around the room on cables so obvious they might as well be glow-in-the-dark. I mean, they didn't even attempt to hide the wires! As Striker's supernatural wrath mounts, it unleashes a spinning rod covered with sparklers, which swings back and forth from more ridiculously visible wires. Then the cult leader melts in a blaze of special effects work not quite as impressive as when all those Nazis melted in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Just as the possessed monster Striker is about to shoot the flames at Liz, who has been crouching up on a ceiling beam this whole time, she calls out his name and, of course, he manages to regain control of himself just in time to hug her. Yeah, you think I'm joking, but I'm actually making it less absurd than it actually is. Professor Montgomery arrives in a helicopter to spirit them away through a nearby window.


Just to make sure everything ends as stupidly as possible, Striker does his best to convey "the pain of sacrifice, and for what?" as he throws one of the jewels into the fire, presumably for one of the surviving ninjas to find and use as a relic of unspeakable power. Apparently the whole part about the jewels being able to end disease and hunger just wasn't payment enough for the valiant sacrifice of a drunk mountain climber and a washed up vaudeville clown.

With the lunkheaded script, the pathetic "action," and special effects that would even embarrass Ed Wood Jr., it's easy to say Treasure of the Four Crowns is one of the worst movies ever made. It's easy to say it because it's pretty much true. I mean, this movie is bad. Really bad. Even when I was a kid I recognized how mind-bogglingly cheap and incompetent this movie was. Few and far between are the movies that showcase so little respect for and so much contempt for their audience. They didn't even make a half-hearted attempt to conceal all the wires, figuring I suppose that we'd be so wowed by the endless scenes of keys and woodchucks and Striker's ass comin' at us in 3D that we wouldn't mind a few short-comings in the other effects.

This is the movie that you need to see if you'd ever wondered if a film could make you say, "Well, it wasn't near as good as Gymkata." This movie sets it's sights on Indiana Jones but fails even to match the pommel horse fury of John Cabot. At it's highest point, this movie almost manages to attain the same level as the lowest points in Gymkata. And as you might suspect, I thoroughly enjoyed the entire mess.

Let's face it, they don't make movies this bad anymore. Sure, they make plenty of bad movies, but those movies are slick, high-tech, well-produced bores. They're not the kind of movies where the fate of the world rests on the shoulders of a clown, even if the clown is named Socrates. I guarantee you Treasure of the Four Crowns, with its three crowns in the movie, will be one of the most awful films you have ever seen, and I also guarantee you that you'd be hard pressed to have a more enjoyable time witnessing such garbage. It'd be different if they'd tried to make a comedy or a spoof, but their intention was to make one of the greatest adventure films the world had ever seen.

Who are "they," you ask? What fool of a producer could possibly think this movie was more action-packed and exciting than Raiders of the Lost Ark when, in reality, it wasn't even as good as a lesser episode of Tales of the Golden Monkey? What man could be so collossally stupid as to think this movie was anything but complete and utter crap?

Golan and Globus, my friends. Golan and Globus.


Depending on who you are and what sort of movies you like, Menahem Golan and his partner in crime Yoram Globus are either geniuses who have littered the world with some of most laughable yet enjoyably lame movies ever made, or they are simply farts straight from the bowels of Lucifer himself. Under the banner of their Studio, Cannon Films, these two seem to have the career goal of making Dino DeLaurentus look like a producer of classy films. The Cannon filmography stretches back into the 1960s and includes such ground-breaking cinematic bottom-feeders as Lady Chatterly's Lovers, The Barbarians, Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, those Lou Ferrigno Hercules movies where the gods all live on the Moon, Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo, and more Chuck Norris films than you want to know about. They gave us Bo Derek in Bolero, Sylvia Kristel in Mata Hari, and Mathilda May strutting around naked and making Patrick Stewart explode in Lifeforce. They gave us Rappin' starring a young Mario Van Peebles, and King Solomon's Mines starring a not so young Richard Chamberlain. They gave us Hot Resort as well as Hot Chili. From their horn of plenty sprung not just Cobra starring Sylvester Stallone, but also Over the Top.

I could list the films that benefited from Cannon's Midas Touch, but it would take days. Suffice it to say that any fan of the worst film has to offer owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to Golan and Globus and their complete and total lack of shame. It is with considerable disappointment in myself that I look back at the films that defined my years of pre-pubescent enlightenment and realize just how many of them came from the hallowed halls of Cannon. Scary as it is, I can safely say that without their steady and relentless stream of complete garbage, sleaze, and worthless junk throughout the 1980s, I would not be the man I am today.

What really elevates these guys, what really makes them special, isn't just that they produced films like Cyborg and Delta Force. No, what really sets them apart from the pack is that not only did they produce those films, but they also produced exploitive rip-offs of their own products, resulting in films like American Cyborg and Delta Force One. It's one thing to exploit a trend, but it's operating on a whole new plane when you manage to exploit your own exploitation of a trend.

Treasure of the Four Crowns is just another jewel in their own eerie collection of crowns with the power to destroy - or heal - the world. It all depends on who wields the power of a mystic gem like Alien from LA or Goin' Bananas, not to be confused with Goin' Ape featuring Tony Danza. No, that gem was produced by the far more respectable Robert Rosen, who also gave us the gift of Revenge. Within the greater cinematic landscape, Treasure of the Four Crowns is an hilariously pathetic attempt at filmmaking that falls so incredibly short of the goals it sets for itself and the promotional bragging that it did that you can't help but love it. It's like those D&D hopeless characters with an ability score of three for everything. But the character, as weak and worthless as he may be, is still lovable, and possesses at least one really cool magic item. In the case of Treasure of the Four Crowns, the magic item is the outlandish but comptentent score by Ennio Morricone, who must have owed Golan or Globus a big favor.

Within the confines of Cannon fodder, if you will, it's pretty much par for the course. As a kid, I found it amazingly stupid yet hilariously enjoyable. As an adult, I find once again that I have not advanced much beyond the level of maturity I had attained by age ten.

Labels: Action: Adventure, Studio: Cannon, Year: 1982