This is largely a word and exposition driven film. It's slickly made and well acted, it's as slick or slicker than Gilling's Hammer films which suffer when compared to the perfectly crafted films of Terence Fisher done at the same time. He has his own style of writing and directing that does separate his work from the rest of Hammer in a unique way. So I was always wanting to see this final film.
There are few appearances of the Templars in this film and they are few and far between. The journey of the hero is to get to the spot his sister died where there is a Cross of the Devil. But it takes almost the entire length of the film to get there and people just talk and talk endlessly and when you are watching subtitles it's hard to even "watch" the nice scenery they travel through. The talk mostly is exposition about the interesting history of the Templars. But those stories all sound like they'd make better more action filled films than this one. It's not the pace of the film that's slow it's the overly talking script and lack of much real "incident" in the film. There is some nice camera movement and the few wordless moments are effective. Few scares though there is a memorable sequence with a solitary eye emerging from the shadows. Frankly that's about as exciting as the middle part of this film gets. Again as you watch just expect very few Templars and that will help some. Nice music score but there isn't much sinister or scary action of score. One assumes Naschy's original script had less talk and more action. This isn't Gilling's worst film but it's not his best. Too bad he didn't get to make more films, but you have to hope if he had they'd be more exciting than this one.
