Crystalstone Reviews

Set in early 20th-century Spain, writer-director Antonio Pelaez's child-friendly adventure follows orphaned on the trail of a fabulous diamond dubbed the "crystalstone." 1908: Nine-year-old Pablo (Kamlesh Gupta) and his little sister, Maria (Laura Jane Goodwin), live with their ailing mother, Isabel (Brigit Forsyth), in a small coastal town; their father, "a dreamer," deserted them years earlier to go adventuring. Pablo holds a deep grudge against his missing dad and is fiercely devoted to Maria. So when Isabel dies and her mean-spirited sister decides to separate the children, banishing Pablo to the care of relatives hundreds of miles away, the youngsters run away together. They hop a freight train and share a car with a mysterious old man, who tells them the story of 16th-century Caballero de Alba (Mario De Barros), who stole a giant diamond from an Aztec temple, only to end his days on an island off the coast of Spain. He kept a diary and upon his death in 1527, left each of his three sons a carved wooden cross, with the cryptic promise that when taken together they would reveal the truth. The story lulls the children to sleep, and when they awaken, the stranger is gone. But he's left them a wooden cross. Pablo and Maria wind up in a small town where they witness the murder of an antique dealer (Lewis Gordon) by a man with a hook (Edward Kelsey); curiously, the dead man has a wooden cross around his neck. The wrong man – drunken sailor Capitan (Frank Grimes) -- is arrested; the children's efforts to have him released are met with scorn. Meanwhile, Pablo realizes that the monastery island where Caballero de Alba died is just offshore, and that clues to the location of the crystalstone lie all around town. A little slow and talky, but a family adventure with a little of everything: Some spook house scares, a grand adventure, spunky siblings (albeit with oddly English accents), silly comedy at the expense of clueless adults and a heart warming ending.