This is one of those movies that seems to have been abandoned by whoever owns the rights to it, so for now the only available ways to see it are poor-quality prints that have been severely cut. The one I saw online was widescreen, at least, but looked like a 4th-generation video dupe, and was about 25 minutes shorter than the longest release version-which was obvious in the cloddish pacing and awkward jump-cuts to new scenes, probably the result of it being hacked down to fit some broadcast slot.
So, it's hard to fairly judge this movie from such an inferior copy. But even at the time it must have seemed pretty retro, the sort of thing that would have looked less silly had Tony Curtis and Yvonne DeCarlo been in it about fifteen years earlier. It's an "exotic adventure" of that hearty, corny, flamboyant type, without much aspiration toward historical accuracy-a spectacle, though not one as spectacular as you might like. (It does not have the scale of Hollywood or European costume epic mega-productions, which had gone out of commercial fashion a few years earlier.) It feels like "Land of the Pharoahs" on a different continent, at least until it turns into far too much of a talkfest-revealing the strain in trying to remake a play of ideas into a realistic adventure movie. There are female vocals on the soundtrack that invariably recall Yma Sumac, because we're in the land of the Incas and because this movie does have that kind of kitsch air to it. There are scenes of slow-motion slaughter that are meant to be shocking and tragic, I guess, but you're very aware of just watching extras fall bloodlessly to the ground after some actor thrusts a prop sword at them.
Robert Shaw, probably hired because bigger action stars (like Heston and Connery) declined, is good but can't quite hold the entertaining but somewhat stilted and clumsy movie together. First brought out on a little throne platform bourn aloft by slaveys--like a low-budget version of the giant float Liz Taylor arrives in in "Cleopatra"-Christopher Plummer understands all this as kitsch, and by hamming it up mercilessly, keeps the viewer as well as himself amused. With his strangled high voice, animal noises and silent-movie gestures, he sounds (and looks, that little golden loincloth aside of course) more like an unhinged geisha in a Kabuki play than anything else. You might consider his portrayal an insult to the grandeur of Inca civilization, but it's more like he's ridiculing the colonialist exotica of this type of film in general. Without him, "Royal Hunt" would be a justifiably forgotten semi-misfire; with him, it's a curio that hasn't aged well but still merits a look.
So, it's hard to fairly judge this movie from such an inferior copy. But even at the time it must have seemed pretty retro, the sort of thing that would have looked less silly had Tony Curtis and Yvonne DeCarlo been in it about fifteen years earlier. It's an "exotic adventure" of that hearty, corny, flamboyant type, without much aspiration toward historical accuracy-a spectacle, though not one as spectacular as you might like. (It does not have the scale of Hollywood or European costume epic mega-productions, which had gone out of commercial fashion a few years earlier.) It feels like "Land of the Pharoahs" on a different continent, at least until it turns into far too much of a talkfest-revealing the strain in trying to remake a play of ideas into a realistic adventure movie. There are female vocals on the soundtrack that invariably recall Yma Sumac, because we're in the land of the Incas and because this movie does have that kind of kitsch air to it. There are scenes of slow-motion slaughter that are meant to be shocking and tragic, I guess, but you're very aware of just watching extras fall bloodlessly to the ground after some actor thrusts a prop sword at them.
Robert Shaw, probably hired because bigger action stars (like Heston and Connery) declined, is good but can't quite hold the entertaining but somewhat stilted and clumsy movie together. First brought out on a little throne platform bourn aloft by slaveys--like a low-budget version of the giant float Liz Taylor arrives in in "Cleopatra"-Christopher Plummer understands all this as kitsch, and by hamming it up mercilessly, keeps the viewer as well as himself amused. With his strangled high voice, animal noises and silent-movie gestures, he sounds (and looks, that little golden loincloth aside of course) more like an unhinged geisha in a Kabuki play than anything else. You might consider his portrayal an insult to the grandeur of Inca civilization, but it's more like he's ridiculing the colonialist exotica of this type of film in general. Without him, "Royal Hunt" would be a justifiably forgotten semi-misfire; with him, it's a curio that hasn't aged well but still merits a look.