Reviews

Not even Saturday matinee fare. Like a bad ventriloquist even kids can tell the voices are not coming from the animals. The animals seem more mature than the humans, and the villain would have been better as a dog.

Talky, almost action-less, sword & sandal flick. There are more scenes of belly dancers than sword fights. Out of an hour and a half running time there are barely seven minutes of film shot outside the soundstage. If there were such things in 1955, I would say this was a direct-to-drive-in production.

I agree with most of the reviews posted. I too saw it when it first opened. I was a huge fantasy fan, especially the Harryhausen movies, and I worshiped Disney's Zorro. But this one may not quite reach their class. Despite the lavish costumes and sets it's easy to see how cut rate many of the special effects were, stock background music, hokey dialogue, and acting that ranges from wooden to over the top. It also becomes apparent that Guy Williams' square-jawed looks, and not his acting, were responsible for most of his success.

Typical TV movie: mediocre acting, contrived dialogue, basic point-and-shoot directing. What's an even greater tragedy is that Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" never rises above this.

The Dickens classic seemingly imagined by George R.R. Martin, and produced by Marvel Studios. Victorian in decoration only. Equal-opportunity casting. Relentless. Ridiculous.

What is there to watch here? Self-videoed "experts" running away from their own shadows, self-proclaimed psychics pumping out the same bilge that any Halloween party medium could spout, 0% hard evidence of anything paranormal, over-dubbed sound effects where viewers wait for real audio to manifest itself, and a grand wrap-up at the end where everyone congratulates themselves on finding...nothing. I'm surprised that Robb Demarest is involved with this junk. He's already earned the respect of investigators and audiences from his previous years with quality productions. After a decade of Ghost Hunters the bar is set pretty high, and this claptrap deserves to be dead and buried with no chance of resurrection.

Don't let Leonard Malton's video guide review of 3-stars for this film misguide you. There are many well done westerns, some of them Wayne's, that are worth your time and money. This one, Curtiz's last, is a colorful, but tediously long, sugar-coated, Hollywood western. Committing numerous sins this film has supposedly Texas Comanches that look like Kansas Plains Indians, set in an Arizona landscape, with outfits that come right out of central costuming. There is little action, and even that is disappointing. The story, as others have written, is confusing and rambling. Characters, Lee Marvin for one, are written out of the script with little or no credible motivation ( late contract dispute?). All in all, a film that may have only made a quick trip to the drive-ins when it came out in it's own day.