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Treasure of Tayopa
Modern day western about an expedition led by Winters to find a lost treasure in the Mexican badlands. Psycho Trapani turns the search into a bloodbath.
Release : | 1974 |
Rating : | 3 |
Studio : | |
Crew : | Director, |
Cast : | Gilbert Roland |
Genre : | Adventure Western |
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Reviews
Best movie of this year hands down!
Perfect cast and a good story
Don't Believe the Hype
Boring
This film could be a "so bad it is good" film. It takes a log time to develop. The part I liked best was Gilbert Roland talking to the audience with a drink in his hand. I was ready to hear him say, "Stay thirsty my friends." A group of people look in Mexico for the Tayopa treasure left behind by padre miners killed in 1646 in Arizona according to the narration. Kathryn (Rena Winters) leads a small group of men who are ready to strap 17 tons of treasure to their backs and walk out. A crazy man named Sally (Phil Trapani) has his eye on Kathryn. There is also a snake curse.It takes 50 minutes to get to Tayopa. There is a lot of dialogue and narration. The action was minimal. Kathryn gets naked and we get to see underwater blurred nudity. They do use metal detectors to look for the treasure. Is there a metal detector that works with the detector held at waist level? No reason. Just asking.Guide: No swearing, sex. Near nudity. Some unintended camp value.
Treasure of Tayopa is about four people who go on an expedition in Mexico in search of lost gold. The group consists of a no nonsense female leader, an exposition-spouting older man, a long haired hothead called Sally and a Mexican side-kick. It's a real obscurity and a bit of an oddball movie overall. Much of its strangeness is on account of how shabbily it has been brought to the screen. Its poorness in most areas has resulted in a film with a somewhat strange ambiance.It could best be described as a semi-western adventure film. But it's quite difficult becoming very involved with the mission itself as it's never exactly very well presented. In fact, it's more than a little boring for much of the time unfortunately. Events are enlivened, however, with some scenes of excessive violence committed by the character Sally, who turns out to be a bit of a psychopath, albeit a somewhat annoying one. His crimes include doubling back to massacre a group of Mexicans for a decidedly minor infraction and administering a bloody whipping to the leading lady. As I say, it's all rather strange but it does feature some decent folk rock on the soundtrack, of a type that I am quite partial to. On the whole, this is one only for the most intrepid cinema fan.
"Treasure of Tayopa" is a real obscurity; though I am well versed in B cinema, I hadn't even heard of this movie until I bought a Mill Creek 50 movie DVD set and found the movie among the 49 others. It doesn't take long to figure out why this movie has been forgotten. It's a real old fashioned movie, coming across like it was made in the 1950s instead of the 1970s. But that's not a fatal problem. The big problem is that the movie is incredibly slow and boring. It takes forever for the movie to present the first real obstacle to its lead characters, and further obstacles are slow and infrequent in coming. As for the whole treasure- hunting portion of the movie, there's hardly any of that as well; most of the movie is just people struggling their way through the desert. I won't mention what eventually happens in the end, but it's a real head scratcher moment. In fact, the whole movie will have you puzzled as to what audience it was aimed for. I can't see that anyone on earth would be entertained by this.
Joking aside, this is a competently made, if rather low budget, thriller about a bunch of gringos (and Fillipe) who trek off into the Sierra Madres in search of . . . the treasure of Tayopa. Duh. Despite the cowboy hats and six-shooters it's less of a western and more of a '70s survivalist movie, with Trapani stealing the show as crazy ass Sally . . . though all of the actors are good, especially Rena Winters, who I could swear I've seen elsewhere, though the IMDb lists this as her sole credit. Numerous spoilers follow.After being introduced to our main characters the film jumps into a bit of back story, with "host/star" Gilbert Roland's narration accompanied by murals of the (fictional?) 17th century Tayopa mission, where Jesuit priests mined gold until they were massacred by Indians. Quickly enough we segue back into our tale, where, as already mentioned, Sally proves himself to be one messed upped mutha, coming on to Rena with increasing frequency and intensity, harassing Fillipe the guide, and locking horns with the ineffectual Stoppard. Along their merry way to Tayopa Sally murders some bandito types ("They pushed my horse - nobody does that" is a cheesy line, but Trapani made me believe it), resulting in the party being stalked by the ruffians' former employer, a sinister looking fellow dressed all in black. And he has a scar. But he's nice to his horse. Upon reaching their destination Sally snaps completely, attempts to rape Rena, kills Stoddard and Fillipe, and finally dies laughing maniacally, after his head is bashed in with a rock. The sinister fella only shows up to witness the aftermath. He is NOT the villain of the piece after all, despite what Mill Creek's product write up states. Really, most of the action centers on Rena and Sally, as individuals and as antagonists to each other. Rena shows herself as particularly resilient, at one point eating raw rattlesnake to stave off death, only after crawling out of a creek half-drowned and covered in welts. In her dying moments, she hallucinates (as I interpreted it) a priest, who offers her water. She dies. The end.After all that unpleasantness, Roland again addresses the audience, restating his assertion that "Tayopa's past will continue to drive people to search today, and plan to search for tomorrow." ---Spoilers end---Despite its low budget, Treasure of Tayopa makes good use of editing techniques and cinematography. I really can't see why it's as obscure as it is, or why nobody connected to it went on to bigger and better things.