After sitting through almost 40 minutes of this unwatchable film, I just had to turn it off. The acting was poor, the screenplay was disjointed, and the storyline was illogical. Some examples: Charlton Heston is supposed to be a Mexican. They give him a Cisco Kid mustache but his accent is from Iowa. His new bride, Janet Leigh, and he are on their honeymoon in Tijuana. If you are taking Janet Leigh on a honeymoon, there are certainly much better places to take her than a scruffy border town. But catch more of this logic. Heston is a law officer in Mexico who is pursuing a drug gang. Right at the border, near where they are walking, a bomb blows up a convertible with two people inside. Heston is with his wife. Logic says that he would assume that this is a dangerous place, not only for him but his wife. But that does not stop him. He tells her to go by herself back to the fleabag hotel where they have chosen to spend their honeymoon. On the way, she is accosted by a bunch of toughs who say that they have a message for her husband. And she follows them! Later on, she is undressing in her hotel room, which has no shades and someone shines a flashlight on her from a window across the street. After she covers up, what does she do? Does she turn the light off in her room? Does she call the management? No, she climbs up and unscrews the hot light bulb in her room, (without a tinge of pain) and throws it across the street into the window where the light came from and she hits a bullseye. (Try throwing a light bulb once. It's like throwing a ping-pong ball.) Later Heston can't seem to find another hotel in the town so the takes her to a fleabag motel in the boondocks, where she is the only guest. (I half expected it to be the Bates Motel). She lounges around the room in a bustier, while a gang of toughs in hot cars arrive. She shows absolutely no fear or trepidation at this turn of events. Meanwhile, her husband still does not seem concerned over her safety, even though the motel is owned by the drug gang chief. At the point I turned it off, Heston was holding a meeting with a few American cops and takes them to his hotel room, which looked perfectly fine. Why then is she in the boondocks? Note that there are pointless cameos of Marlene Dietrich and Eva Gabor and even Dennis Weaver whose acting consists of looking back and forth nervously behind a set of overly large glasses. For those of you who view this film positively, you must have watched a different movie than the one I watched.
Review of Touch of Evil
