Sharks' Treasure

Sharks' Treasure is an excellent sea adventure. The film centers around four men hunting for lost treasure. The men are plagued with problems from bandits, greed, and dangerous sharks. The underwater photography is superb. Cornel Wilde produced, wrote, directed, and stared in this film; which he states was a "team effort". I give this film a 9/10.

Below average Cornel Wilde adventure/thriller movie filled with underwater scenes , astonishing fights , well handled sharks scenes and violence . This is a violent adventure movie that earned notoriety because of on location , a sea pleny of hungry sharks , as stunt divers were really injured by sharks . It deals with a band of hustlers and escaped convicts (all-male support cast) led by Jim Carnahan (60-year-old Cornel Wilde who demonstratre his fitness by doing one-handed press-up on deck) commander a boat filled with gold . He's stuck there when a buch of risible pirates assaul the boat . As these desperadoes are also attempting to retrieve gold bullion that lies deep in shark-infested waters . See the most sensational shark fight ever filmed!

Very failed and unexceptional adventure/thriller except as a virtual one man show by Cornel Wilde . It is a typical Cornel Wilde film with action-infested dumbness with plenty of thrills , brawls and violent confrontations . The naivite and oddity of the screenplay can scarcely cope with the diverse strands of script queueing up and waiting to be dealt with : underwater searches for treasures , confrontation themselves and with some nasty pirates . In making this underwater adventure yarn , in freak weather conditions , were hired some stuntmen , and experimenter divers to shot the dangerous Shark Sequences on exotic locations in Coral Sea, South Pacific, Pacific Ocean . Notorious underwater explorer Jacques Costeau commented that despite its cruelty , he had never before known a white killer shark attack a man in so vicious a manner . Rather unified is Wilde's homespun philosophising : the perils of nicotine and drink and the virtues of keeping fit . Two-fisted and tough acting by Cornel Wilde as a drifter who carries out a risked raid on a sunken ship in the shark-infested waters . He played several adventure movies , such as : ¨The greatests show on the earth¨,¨Treasure of Golden condor¨, ¨Passion¨, ¨Sword of Lancelot¨, ¨Omar Khayyam , ¨At sword's point¨ , ¨A thousand and one nights¨ , ¨Norseman¨, ¨The fifth musketeer¨ and directed/acted the classic ¨The naked prey¨ and other successes in all kinds of genres as ¨Leave her to heaven¨, ¨Forever amber¨, ¨Road house¨, ¨Big combo¨, ¨Wintertime¨ , ¨A song to remember¨, ¨High Sierra¨.The film benefits itself from a nice support cast , such as Yaphet Kotto , Cliff Osmond , David Canary , David Gilliam , John Neilson and brief appearance by recently deceased Carmen Argenziano .

It contains an anti-climatic and inappropriate musical score . The movie displays an evocative cinematography , being extremely necesary a perfect remasting . Shot on location in Bonaire, Dutch West Indies , Coral Sea, South Pacific, Pacific Ocean . The motion picture was regularly made by Cornel Wilde . Here he starred , wrote , produced and directed . Always primitive , Wilde's movies seem to operate increasingly in a strange limbo with no points of reference outside his own simple view of the world . In Shark's treasure Wilde does a little effective job both as actor and filmmaker . He is especially credited as a good actor but also known for directing some acceptable flicks . His later films were of varying quality, and he ended his career in near-cameos in minor adventure films . As he directed adventures as¨Maracaibo¨ ,¨Lancelot and Guinevere¨, ¨Sharks' Treasure¨ but also Noir Cinema as ¨The Devil's Hairpin¨, ¨Storm Fear¨ and Sci Fi : ¨Blade of Grass¨. And a real oddity : ¨The naked prey ¨ , it Is an amazingly well done movie , being Cornel Wilde's best movie as a filmmaker .

In his later years Cornel Wilde did a number of films on his own as his day as a box office draw had long gone. Stuff like Beach Red and The Naked Prey were interesting. Sharks' Treasure was quite a bit less in quality than those others were.

Wilde here is a charter boat captain no doubt giving three hour tours like the Skipper and Gilligan did on the USS Minow. Young surfer kid John Neilson brings an old Spanish gold doubloon and he knows where there might be more on the Mexican coast.

Wilde and Neilson take on Yaphett Kotto and David Canary as crew and the four set out for the spot that Neilson says the treasure was found. The four do some considerable diving and then have the misfortune to run across a group of escaped convicts led by Lobo as played by Cliff Osmond who certainly justified his name.

One of the convicts is David Gilliam who looks a lot like Neilson, blond and pretty and Osmond's personal boy toy from prison. Osmond's weakness is Gilliam and Neilson is no doubt grateful Gilliam's around otherwise these guys who haven't seen any female companionship would zero in on him. It all proves their undoing.

The underwater sequences are nice and the sharks as a dangerous as those in the various Jaws films. And the guys are all walking around in various states of undress which no doubt titillated the women and gay men in the audience. Cornel Wilde certainly looked in good shape for a guy in his sixties.

Sharks' Treasure is your routine action film, other than the underwater sequences and the well put together men, nothing more.

There's some really impressive underwater action and ocean photography, but the rest of the movie is pretty tedious and unless you really want to watch old men in speedos yelling at each other or innocent sharks getting killed on camera, I can't recommend sitting through this forgotten slog.

Sheesh! What a dreadful movie. Dodgy camera work, a script with more corn than Kellogg's, and acting so hammy you could open a pig farm with it.

To cap it all, it doesn't know which audience to aim at - we have Cornel Wilde - or is that Corny Wilde? - getting on his soap box about the hazards of smoking any time someone lights a cigarette, dear oh dear, and in another awkward scene we have the baddie, Lobo, forcing his, ahem, if you will, 'male friend' to do a striptease dressed in a bikini. Try explaining that one to the kids...

Throw in an overly contrived Treasure Island-cum-Jaws type storyline, and the result is a film so unintentionally funny, it's enjoyable - I shouldn't expect a Special Edition DVD any time soon, though.