The Da Vinci Treasure starts in London in England where an American anthropologist named Michael Archer (C. Thomas Howell) & his assistant Griffe (Antonio Jaramillo) has broken into a stately house, there to steal rare handwritten papers by Leonardo Da Vinci five hundred odd years ago that are supposed to reveal the location of a stash of stolen gold & treasure. They find what they are after but Griffe betrays Archer & tries to take the papers for himself, in the ensuing fight Griffe is stabbed & dies. Running from the scene Archer is cornered by evil archaeologist Dr. John Coven (Lance Henriksen) who takes the papers for himself. Archer remains committed to working out the clues Da Vinci left behind & find the location of the long lost treasure & has sexy sidekick Giulia Pedina (Nicole Sherwin) to help, from Italy to obtain the Turin Shroud to back to London to get some optical glasses to Afghanistan where the treasure hunt finally ends...
Edited, co-written & directed by Peter Mervis I hated The Da Vinci Treasure, take it from me it's total crap from start to finish & all those involved should be embarrassed & hang their heads in shame for producing such an awful film of no merit or value whatsoever. I also hate the Th Asylum, the talentless money grabbing hack company that churn out endless rip-offs of big budget Hollywoof films such as Universal Soldiers (2007), Sunday School Musical (2008), 100 Million BC (2008), The Day the Earth Stopped (2008), Death Racers (2008), Paranormal Entity (2009), Haunting of Winchester House (2009) & The Terminators (2009) in just a few of their output from the past couple of years & the one major thing in common between all these films is that they are all crap. The Asylum specialise in making the worst, low budget film you can imagine & then riding on the success of a big Hollywood blockbuster to cheat people into seeing it by mistake. That's The Asylum's entire business plan, I hate them for making so many awful films & the fact that I'm dumb enough to keep watching the things annoys me even more. When will I ever learn? There are so many things wrong with The Da Vinci Treasure it's hard to know where to begin, more of a low rent rip-off of National Treasure (2004) with a lethargic & pointless trek across the world from London to Turin (although all shot in California) to solve clues (the Mona Lisa is based on a Pythagoras triangle you know) left by Leonardo Da Vinci in order to find some treasure which they randomly blow up at the end (just what does happen at the end? Archer presses something with a stick & then boom!) but manage to survive yet the blast being strong enough to leave a huge crater in the ground because they hide under what looks like a blanket. The film switches from one country to another very abruptly, it seems like Archer can travel thousands of miles in mere seconds, or so The Da Vinci Treasure & it's sloppy narrative would suggest. At 90 odd minutes it's slow, boring & feels more like two days (it took me three attempts over three days to watch it all). The character's are awful, there's no background or motivation for anything anyone does, the bad guy is given no reason to be the bad guy & suddenly turns up out of nowhere at the end. The history is awful, the geography is terrible, the plot is boring & central quest for the treasure is underwhelming. Avoid at all costs.
As well as conceptually The Da Vinci Treasure also continues the trend of films from The Asylum to be technically incompetent. The worst car chase in cinematic history is supposedly set on the streets of London although it was obviously filmed in California, the makers flipped the screen so the cars drove on the 'correct' side but that also means all the road signs are in reverse. Incompetent. While making a daring escape through Turin in Italy all the signs & shops fronts are in English, again because it was shot in California. Awful. The scenes set in Afghanistan at the end are ridiculous, the one guy has an American car (a sure fire way to get yourself shot or blown up) & Giulia wears a low cut top & jeans. They use GPS tracking to locate the treasure & the entrance to the tomb is buried under a thin layer of sand despite being untouched & lost for centuries! The whole production is embarrassingly cheap, from comedy Da Vinci glasses to the ancient shroud that looks like a blanket to some truly awful CGI computer effects that are cringe worthy at best.
With a supposed budget of about $850,000 the pitifully low budget probably had something to do with how bad The Da Vinci Treasure turned out but it feels like no-one made any effort & quite simply The Asylum doesn't care about the films it puts out. All The Asylum cares about is the bottom line profit it can make by conning people into watching turds like this. The acting is awful, C. Thomas Howell is slumming it while Lance Henriksen gets about five minutes of random screen time trying to look & sound evil for no apparent reason.
The Da Vinci Treasure is a poor mans adventure film knock-off that is truly painful to sit through, from rotten production values & special effects to a disregard for history & geography as well as a boring script that probably took half a day to write. Avoid at all costs.
Edited, co-written & directed by Peter Mervis I hated The Da Vinci Treasure, take it from me it's total crap from start to finish & all those involved should be embarrassed & hang their heads in shame for producing such an awful film of no merit or value whatsoever. I also hate the Th Asylum, the talentless money grabbing hack company that churn out endless rip-offs of big budget Hollywoof films such as Universal Soldiers (2007), Sunday School Musical (2008), 100 Million BC (2008), The Day the Earth Stopped (2008), Death Racers (2008), Paranormal Entity (2009), Haunting of Winchester House (2009) & The Terminators (2009) in just a few of their output from the past couple of years & the one major thing in common between all these films is that they are all crap. The Asylum specialise in making the worst, low budget film you can imagine & then riding on the success of a big Hollywood blockbuster to cheat people into seeing it by mistake. That's The Asylum's entire business plan, I hate them for making so many awful films & the fact that I'm dumb enough to keep watching the things annoys me even more. When will I ever learn? There are so many things wrong with The Da Vinci Treasure it's hard to know where to begin, more of a low rent rip-off of National Treasure (2004) with a lethargic & pointless trek across the world from London to Turin (although all shot in California) to solve clues (the Mona Lisa is based on a Pythagoras triangle you know) left by Leonardo Da Vinci in order to find some treasure which they randomly blow up at the end (just what does happen at the end? Archer presses something with a stick & then boom!) but manage to survive yet the blast being strong enough to leave a huge crater in the ground because they hide under what looks like a blanket. The film switches from one country to another very abruptly, it seems like Archer can travel thousands of miles in mere seconds, or so The Da Vinci Treasure & it's sloppy narrative would suggest. At 90 odd minutes it's slow, boring & feels more like two days (it took me three attempts over three days to watch it all). The character's are awful, there's no background or motivation for anything anyone does, the bad guy is given no reason to be the bad guy & suddenly turns up out of nowhere at the end. The history is awful, the geography is terrible, the plot is boring & central quest for the treasure is underwhelming. Avoid at all costs.
As well as conceptually The Da Vinci Treasure also continues the trend of films from The Asylum to be technically incompetent. The worst car chase in cinematic history is supposedly set on the streets of London although it was obviously filmed in California, the makers flipped the screen so the cars drove on the 'correct' side but that also means all the road signs are in reverse. Incompetent. While making a daring escape through Turin in Italy all the signs & shops fronts are in English, again because it was shot in California. Awful. The scenes set in Afghanistan at the end are ridiculous, the one guy has an American car (a sure fire way to get yourself shot or blown up) & Giulia wears a low cut top & jeans. They use GPS tracking to locate the treasure & the entrance to the tomb is buried under a thin layer of sand despite being untouched & lost for centuries! The whole production is embarrassingly cheap, from comedy Da Vinci glasses to the ancient shroud that looks like a blanket to some truly awful CGI computer effects that are cringe worthy at best.
With a supposed budget of about $850,000 the pitifully low budget probably had something to do with how bad The Da Vinci Treasure turned out but it feels like no-one made any effort & quite simply The Asylum doesn't care about the films it puts out. All The Asylum cares about is the bottom line profit it can make by conning people into watching turds like this. The acting is awful, C. Thomas Howell is slumming it while Lance Henriksen gets about five minutes of random screen time trying to look & sound evil for no apparent reason.
The Da Vinci Treasure is a poor mans adventure film knock-off that is truly painful to sit through, from rotten production values & special effects to a disregard for history & geography as well as a boring script that probably took half a day to write. Avoid at all costs.