Adventure in Wonder-Vision

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

A couple of largely forgotten '80s adventures.

THE CHALLENGE (1982)

Directed by John Frankenheimer from a screenplay by Richard Maxwell that got a five day rewrite from John Sayles to change the setting from China to Japan and improve the characters, The Challenge stars Scott Glenn as a lead character who’s just as flawed as his horrendous haircut. He’s down-on-his-luck boxer Rick Murphy, who has no real scruples or goals in life. His status as a nobody does get him hired to do a job, though: he’s tasked with smuggling a sword, which will be hidden inside a bag of golf clubs, from America into Japan. The trouble starts when he lands in Japan and finds that he has stumbled into the middle of a conflict between brothers Toru Yoshida (Toshiro Mifune) and Hideo Yoshida (Atsuo Nakamura). Both want to take ownership of the sword, which is one half of a pair known as The Equals... and it’s clear that Toru, an old fashioned fellow who runs a martial arts school, is a much better person than the massively wealthy, modernized Hideo, who has a bunch of homicidal lackeys working for him.

Rick doesn’t care who’s good or bad in this scenario, he just wants to protect his own well-being and hopefully make some money in the process. He starts off clueless, barely scraping his way through situations, and shows a willingness to shift alliances based on whatever appears to be a safer option for him. He agrees to spend time in Toru’s school so he can steal the sword for Hideo – but, of course, he gets a redemption arc as the movie’s two hour running time plays out. It takes a while, but he does eventually see the value of helping Toru and working against Hideo... and by the climactic sequence, he has evolved from a bumbling scrapper to a skilled swordsman.

The Challenge is an interesting movie that’s a lot better than I was expecting it to be, with a surprisingly good script. It can be a bummer hanging out with a character who’s as worthless as Rick Murphy is for a long stretch of the film, but the ride is worth it in the end, building up to a really cool climactic action sequence where Toru and Rick work together to raid Hideo’s hi-tech, well-guarded base of operations.

This movie shouldn’t be as obscure as it is. I have hardly ever heard it (or the shorter TV version called Sword of the Ninja) get referenced in the decades since it was released, but I’m very glad I finally managed to stumble across it.

TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS (1983)

When it comes to the amount of screen time given to legendary drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs when he hosts a movie, we’ve come a long way. On his TNT show MonsterVision, he would introduce the movie and then drop in to talk to the viewer some more at each commercial break. The Last Drive-in, his series on the Shudder streaming service, works in the same way – but since it’s a streamer, Joe Bob is allowed to talk a whole lot more. Sometimes his hosting segments will add more than an hour to a movie’s running time. But he got his start back in the ‘80s on The Movie Channel – and in his early years there, he hardly got any screen time at all.

Take, for example, the triple feature he hosted on The Movie Channel on June 4, 1988. He referred to it as the Friday Night Iron Man Marathon Triple Feature, but it actually got rolling at 1:45 Saturday morning. Joe Bob appeared on the screen to introduce the triple feature of Ninja III: The Domination, The Lady in Red, and Treasure of the Four Crowns – and everything he had to say about these movies, he had to pack into just 2 minutes. At 1:47, Ninja III got rolling, followed by The Lady in Red at 3:20 and Treasure of the Four Crowns at 4:50... and that whole night, viewers only got to see two minutes of Joe Bob.

He enjoyed the Flashdance / The Exorcist / Poltergeist / Enter the Dragon mash-up Ninja III, giving it 3 stars, and the John Dillinger period drama The Lady in Red, giving it 3 and a half stars, but he was not a fan of Treasure of the Four Crowns. His rating for this shot-in-3D Indiana Jones ripoff was “dog doo-doo.”

Treasure of the Four Crowns isn’t a particularly good movie, but it packs so much action and “tossing stuff at the camera” 3D nonsense into its 100 minutes, I can’t say that it’s dog doo-doo. It stars Tony Anthony, who was known for his starring roles in Spaghetti Westerns, but doesn’t have much screen presence or appeal in this movie. He plays soldier of fortune J.T. Striker, who gets hired to do the sort of “find and steal this relic” jobs that Indiana Jones would often get mixed up in. Directed by Ferdinando Baldi from a screenplay crafted by Lloyd Battista, Jim Bryce, Jerry Lazarus, Tony Pettito, and Gene Quintano (why it took five people to come up with this is beyond me), the movie gets started with a Star Wars-style text scroll telling us that the four crowns are something we cannot hope to understand, powers we cannot hope to possess, and forces we cannot hope to control. Then there’s a twenty minute action sequence that is quite reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark and features J.T. infiltrating a castle so he can retrieve a key that a times seems to have a life of its own. To do so, he has to deal with birds, snakes, dogs, and supernatural attackers – but even after he has laughing, invisible beings tossing flaming rocks at him, he’ll say he doesn’t believe in “fairy tale crap.”

He doesn’t speak to anyone until 21 minutes into the movie, at which time he’s tasked with retrieving a couple of the crowns from the mountain fortress that serves as home to a cult led by a creep called Brother Jonas (Emiliano Redondo). For 30 minutes, we watch J.T. get told about the crowns and then assemble a heist team that includes a professor’s assistant, an alcoholic mountain climber, a strongman-turned-clown with a bad heart, and a trapeze artist. Then it’s time for an extended heist sequence. And that’s the whole movie.

I have seen Treasure of the Four Crowns described as terribly dull, but I thought it moved along and a good pace and appreciated the lengthy action sequences. In his review, Roger Ebert compiled a brief checklist of things that this movie pushes out into the screen: “knives, spears, darts, bones, jeweled daggers, balls of fire, laser beams, boulders, ropes, attack dogs, bats, shards of stained glass, a set of dishes, a large kettle, a stove, a corpse, a python snake, an empty glove, birds (both real and artificial), arrows, unidentifiable glowing objects shot from guns, keys, letter openers, several human heads, skeletons, large sections of an exploding castle, one bottle of booze, and assorted spoons.” With all that going on, how can a viewer get bored?

That’s not even taking into account the crazy climactic sequence, which involves the skeptical J.T. gaining some supernatural abilities of his own. So this movie might not be good, but it’s worth checking out.