Thursday Movie Picks: Treasure Hunts

 

For the 33rd week of 2021 as part of Wandering Through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks. We delve into the subject of treasure hunts as it play into a group of people trying to find a mysterious treasure while also use it as a bonding experience or be destroyed by greed. Here are my three picks:

1. Enemy Gold

Part of the legendary Bullets, Bombs, and Babes film series from Andy Sidaris is a film directed by his son Christian Drew Sidaris about a team of secret agents trying to find missing Confederate gold before a group of bad guys get it first and sell it for a shitload of money. It’s a typical B-movie fare but Christian manages to capture much of his father’s tropes of gratuitous violence, thrilling action, comedy, girls in bikinis, and most of all, boobs. This is a film, like many of Sidaris’ work, never take themselves seriously as it adds to the entertainment quality while what straight-laced young man couldn’t enjoy seeing Playboy Playmate Suzi Simpson shooting a crossbow in a thong or the late, great Penthouse Pet Julie Strain wielding a samurai sword topless? Good times.

2. King of California

An overlooked gem of a film starring Michael Douglas and Evan Rachel Wood as an estranged father-daughter duo with the former playing a mentally-ill musician who believes he knows where some lost treasure is as he seeks the help from the latter. There, they discover that the treasure is buried under a Costco as a series of misadventures ensue yet Douglas and Wood make the film such a joy to watch. Even as it play into a young woman coming to terms with her father’s illness and her own faults.

3. Boy

Taika Waititi’s sophomore feature film is definitely a film audiences need to seek out more as it is a comedy-tragedy film as it relates to a young boy whose father returns home unaware that his father has returned to find lost treasure he had hidden while being away. Really, it’s a film about a boy dealing with growing pains and the death of his mother years ago as well as this fantasy of what his father might be doing when he was away. It is a film that blur the lines between reality and fiction for the titular character as it has Waititi play the father who is a man that returned for selfish reasons yet has to face his own reality about the world he’s in and the fact that has a more important treasure to take care of.

© thevoid99 2021