2/10
More wooden than the ships
3 June 2014
I'm surprised by another review that characterizes this film as briskly paced and Eva Gabor as providing "sterling" support. Even at 82 minutes the film simply crawls -- I had to speed up the DVD playback just to get through it, and I'm a collector of swashbuckler films! Anthony Dexter and Alan Hale, Jr. are fine, as far as they go, but Eva Gabor is simply terrible: wooden and unconvincing. Yet even if she'd had the skills of a Patricia Medina, the atrocious screenplay would still have thwarted her efforts -- it's really that bad. Swashbucklers are, by nature, stylized, so I wasn't expecting cinéma vérité, but this movie is so stilted it's simply unwatchable without a peanut gallery a la "Mystery Science Theater 3000". I have more than 90 swashbuckler films on DVD and this one is so unenjoyable that it won't go on the shelf with the others. For far better pirate fare try "Captain Blood", "Fortunes of Captain Blood", "Captain Blood Returns", "Anne of the Indies", "The Black Swan", "The Sea Hawk", "The Spanish Main", "Seven Seas to Calais", "Duel on the Mississippi", "The Buccaneer", "The Black Pirate", "Raiders of the Seven Seas", or even "Last of the Buccaneers" and "Pirates of Tripoli". All of these are available on DVD and even the latter two rather-mediocre swashbucklers are far superior to "Captain Kidd...". The other films listed are delightful alternatives.
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