The Lost Treasure Of The Grand Canyon
Lost and unfortunately found
It's Creature Feature Saturday once again. I'm still putting off watching the Tara Reid movie “Vipers.” Don't you worry. I'll dive into that visual car crash soon enough, but for now I tried something a little different. I have no real reason for picking The Lost Treasure of the Grand Canyon other than Shannen Doherty being in it. I guess I had some mental 90210 connection from my previous review, The Screwfly Solution. Yeah, sure. We'll go with that excuse. I figured since it had a real actress in it, it might not be completely terrible. Once again, I was wrong.
The Lost Treasure of the Grand Canyon takes place in the Grand Canyon during the late 19th century. A team of researchers from the Smithsonian museum have stumbled across a hidden Aztec civilization within the canyon. As weeks pass, Susan Jordan (Shannen Doherty, 90210, Mallrats) sets out an expedition to find the researchers, her father being among the lost. Joined by the scholarly Jacob Thain (Stargate SG-1's Michael Shanks), researcher Marco (JR Bourne, The Exorcism of Emily Rose) and others, Susan sets out into the canyon. The group reaches the hidden civilization and discover that the surviving members of the team are being sacrificed. Susan's father is found alive in informs the group that the Aztec god, Quetzalcoatl, is real and is terrorizing the Aztecs. Will the group escape the hidden civilization with valuable artifacts or will they become a meal for the Aztec god.
Gimme a hug, big guy!
At it's most basic, the story in Lost Treasure is not that bad. Group gets lost, other group goes in search of them, bad stuff happens. Plenty of movies can't even get that far. It's when we go slightly deeper that the movie begins to fall apart faster than an Ikea bookshelf being held together with gum. An ancient civilization is hiding in the Grand Canyon. What. The. Hell. No one has noticed until now? They haven't ventured out into the outside world once? Where do they get food? It's just completely ridiculous, even for a SyFy movie. No one has seen this giant flying Aztec god? Speaking of Quetzalcoatl, the computer effects used to create him look like they were made on a Commodore 64. Remember the computerized Reptile from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation? Yeah it looked like that, but with some baby puke thrown on top of it. The movie is set in the desert, so you'd assume most of the money would go into making the creature look good. If that's the case, this movie was made with spare change.
Shannen Doherty does her best with a silly story and a weak script. Michael Shanks tries to hold things together, but I feel like he was dying a little bit inside delivering some of his lines. The rest of the cast though are downright painful to listen to. There is little action as a majority of the story is focused on the search for the lost group and then a search for a way out. It takes all the boring wandering moments from Lord of the Rings, puts it in the desert, and gets rid of all that pesky action and entertainment that LOTR had. I found myself getting increasingly bored as the movie progressed. The opposite is supposed to happen, especially in a horror movie.
I wonder what Dylan and Kelly are up to right now
The Lost Treasure of the Grand Canyon is plagued with a nonsensical story, a lack of logic, poor dialogue, minimum action, and bad acting. The special effects are laughable and makes me wonder why actors would want to be in this movie. It's your typical Saturday afternoon SyFy throwaway movie, next to such winners as SS Doomtrooper and Ice Spiders. Save yourself the brain cells, and skip this movie.
2.5/10