COMIN' AT YA! (1981), TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS (1983)

 

PHENOMENALITY: (1) naturalistic, (2) *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I've devoted space to a number of limited talents who made one or two notable films and then either left the industry or become hired guns for TV. But there are also a number of people who really had no discernible talent except to take advantage of trends.

In the sixties American actor/producer Tony Anthony parlayed the enthusiasm for spaghetti westerns into a short career as a star of Italian horse operas, four featuring a character called "the Stranger" (largely a Clint Eastwood clone) while the fifth was the above average BLINDMAN. The craze for the subgenre had bottomed out in the mid seventies, and Anthony went into other endeavors. However, in the late seventies he made contact with two other businessmen. Between the three of them they not only brought a single spaghetti oater into prominence (with Anthony as the lead), they also launched a new iteration of the fifties' "3-D craze" with their western COMIN' AT YA. The film's success led to American studios launching 3-D versions of properties such as JAWS and THE AMITYVILLE HORROR. However, the eighties 3-D craze lasted no longer than the one in the 1950s, for when Anthony and his partners tried to duplicate their success in 1983 with TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS (also starring Anthony), they crashed and burned. Anthony retired from filmmaking, though one of his collaborators, Gene Quintano, had fluctuating success as a Hollywood writer and/or director for the next ten or so years.

The success of the 1981 film isn't hard to understand. While it's just another formula western-- albeit one more sentimental than the more famous Italian works-- director Ferdinando (BLINDMAN) Baldi and composer Ennio Morricone revived many of the sensory and narrative tropes they'd used throughout the first wave of the spaghettis. It's a very simple story of white slavers abducting the bride (Victoria Abril) of gunfighter Hart (Anthony), followed by Hart's involved efforts to rescue his wife and to revenge himself upon the outlaw gang. There's no metaphenomenal content and it might be a stretch for me to categorize Hart's mission as an example of naturalistic "bizarre crimefighting--" though Hart does blow up a whole town before executing his main enemy by blowing up the windmill to which the villain is bound. Ironically, the flick's greatest asset was that it only used the 3-D effects sparingly.

I don't know what went on afterward, but I will theorize that Anthony and his partners instantly decided that their new motto would be "nothing succeeds like excess." One quote claims that Quintano wanted to follow up the success of COMIN' AT YA with a heist film like TOPKAPI. But clearly the story put together by Anthony and Quintano (albeit turned into a screenplay by three other guys) is much more indebted to a much bigger 1981 success: Steven Spielberg's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. That said, TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS does often seem like a hideous amalgam of RAIDERS with a very bad heist-film-- and the strange result may be the only imitation of Indiana Jones that didn't have a combative hero anywhere near it. Even the return of Baldi as director and Morricone as composer couldn't stem the chaos that ensued.

Anthony didn't look very dynamic when he was shooting owlhoots in COMIN' AT YA, but in CROWNS he looks pasty and bloated when he's seen, all on his own, negotiating various traps in a cave, trying to obtain an artifact for his employers. For the film's first ten minutes phlegmatic protagonist "J.T. Striker" is assailed by animals, automatic traps and what seem to be discarnate spirits, with no rhyme or reason. He escapes the cave, returns to civilization (somehow) and delivers the desired artifact to his employers. After minor resistance, the employers talk Striker into assembling a heist-team that can break into the compound of a malevolent cult-leader. For scientific reasons, Striker's benefactors want this "tomb raider" to steal a treasure from the compound which will make it possible to summon forth the power of "the Four Crowns" (even though one crown was lost in antiquity, so there's really only three).

The film spends about half an hour having Striker recruit a bunch of maladjusted ne'er-do-wells who will constitute his ideal heist-team. These half-baked characters aren't worth describing, except to say that they demonstrate that none of the writers knew how to execute even limited characterizations. Even trapeze artist Liz (Ana Obregon) sparks no interest. Striker eventually talks even the most reluctant allies into joining his team, though he does so in part by whipping out the cave-artifact and showing his partners how it can call forth poltergeist-related effects. It never occurs to Striker that this might have fatal consequences, because the script says, "Shoehorn in as many ridiculous 3-D effects as possible, no matter how you do it."

Then the remainder of the film is devoted to the team's glacial progress as they break into the cult-compound. To sum up, traps of some sort kill all of the heist-artists except Striker and Liz (the better to make sure they're able to hook up in the end). Then things look grim for the survivors when the cultists catch them and start to spray them with machine gun fire. However, Striker has just obtained two mystic gems from whatever crowns are in the sanctum. The gems give Striker the power to enact a ghastly reprise of the Nazi-Killing Scene from RAIDERS, wiping out the cultists with patently phony FX and lots of objects-flying-on-wires. Once all the villains are dead, Striker is able to throw off the influence of the possessing power, whatever it was, and to destroy the gems so that no one can use them again. Roll credits.

While no RAIDERS-imitator was ever able to touch the hem of Spielberg's directorial jacket, Anthony and Quintano may be the only ones to botch the basic idea of the daredevil-adventurer. Neither Striker nor any of his aides get into exciting fights or execute thrilling escapes,. So it appears that the guys who forged the main story thought that all RAIDERS had going for it was a big boulder at the start and a bunch of evildoers getting blasted to smithereens at the conclusion. But though CROWNS flopped at the 1983 box office, I have the impression that people looking for the next "so bad it's good" film probably will get more of a boost from CROWNS than from COMIN' AT YA.

Though Anthony retired after CROWNS, Quintano was able to parley the success of COMIN' AT YA into a career. Oddly, a year or so after the awfulness of CROWNS, he co-wrote two more Indiana-clones for Cannon Films, the back-to-back films KING SOLOMON'S MINES and ALLEN QUATERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD. Mediocre as these movies were, they look like models of well-executed formula fiction next to CROWNS, so I think the rapid improvement must lie with Quintano's co-writers, even though they didn't have stellar careers either.