Warlords of Atlantis (1978)

the audience applauded

One of my all time favorites.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

What would you expect from a movie that features Cliff Clavin?Not much, right?Well not much would be a huge improvement over what it actually is.There isn't a single thing in this movie that makes sense.It starts with two guys throwing a baseball(like girls) over a scientist who has a bunch of glass beakers sitting next to him and of course they end up breaking some of them.Why did they have to play ball there?Why did the scientist have glass beakers when he had no intention of ever mixing or even using chemicals?So anyway, the one guy has invented a diving bell that doesn't have a bottom and magically, it never fills with water.They get lowered down on a rope and find a large gold statue.They somehow manage to get it into the bottom of the diving bell and tie an extremely long rope around it and somehow the other end of the rope is tied to the ship above.Even though there was clearly no rope in the bell when they left.When it gets to the ship the captain immediately tells one of the scientists that his men may try a mutiny and then they immediately do just that.Weak.The crew cuts the rope to the bell and attack the others.Then a giant octopus attacks and drags them all hundreds of feet under water and they all live.Then he goes back for the bell.Once in Atlantis it just gets worse.They say they were brought there for taking the statue but later we find that Atlantis just needed to replace dead slaves.Did I mention Atlantis has guards that wear helmets that cover their face and the humans have no problem punching them and knocking them out?They get locked in a cell and it looks like they are doomed.Then two extremely slow moving monsters attack and they are content to just eat the one Atlantean slave who has a speaking part and then smash into the main characters cell, freeing them but not hurting them.Weak.Then they find a sewer grate with all the bars broken for easy access.Because in a world run by tyrants, who would notice that?The other end of the sewer(where all the non-slaves live) is just covered by some hanging beads?WTF?So they get back to the diving bell and drive it to the surface.If the bell was self-propelled why did it have to be lowered on a rope?Why was it inoperable after the rope was cut?Why did they even get out of it if it was still working?The octopus comes back and smashes their ship so they get in a row boat with no oars and the octopus just leaves them alone.Then it's implied that they all live.Somehow making it hundreds of miles with no radio or oars or food.This movie should never be seen by anyone.

Searching for treasures, a scientific, his son (Peter Gilmore) and Greg Collinson (Doug McClure) are double-crossed by their crew (John Ratzenberger: Cheers, among others).When they're into a diving bell are attacked by a sea monster and the sailors are dragged by a giant octopus. The ship-wrecked crew find inhabitants of the lost world of Atlantis, the lost continent written by Platon. It's ruled by an alien race(Michael Gothard,Daniel Massey and Cyd Charisse) from Mars which wish to rule the human beings and the creation a totalitarian state.This fantasy picture packs thrills, action, weird monsters, lively pace and fantastic scenarios. The monsters are the real stars of this production and its chief attribute. The tale is silly and laughable but the effects and action are quite well. Among the most spectacular of its visuals there are a deeply shrouded caverns full of monsters roaring menacingly towards the camera, the attack of a giant lizard on a fortress, and the futuristic backgrounds of Atlantis . Some illogical parts in the argument are more than compensated for the excitement provided by Roger Dicken's monsters, though sometimes are a little bit cheesy. Filmed in glimmer cinematography by Alan Hume on location in Malta and in Pinewood studios , England. Colorful and stirring musical score by Vickers. This is the fourth collaboration between producer John Dark and director Kevin Connor who also made in similar style : ¨The land that time forgot(1975)¨, ¨All the Earth's core(76)¨, ¨The people that time forgot(77)¨mostly starred by Doug McClure and with Dicken as the monster-maker. The film will appeal to kids who swallow whole and sit convulsed in their armchair.

one word to describe this movie: mediocre. sort of mad max (see the prisoners and the atlantean first cities ) meets sinbad (SFX would still be poor if dated 20 years earlier ) meets cable TV tripe, like those "lost/treasure island" short telepictures from the 1960-70s for a young audience. Acting is mediocre-to-poor. When gummy faced Mcclure plays the hot dud to impress the mad max belle, well...how corny can anything get? A superior race of martians defends itself using XIX century rifles and cannons? Do me a favor...lock the screenplay writer in a padded cell. They also try to add the victorian element, so well done and fitting in the earlier Dracula movies, yet with poor results here. All in all, rather than a real movie (yes, low budget and all ), it looked like an extended episode from some cable TV "adventure" series. They even try to add plot twists, but it gets even more laughable. Pathetic main actors; even ridiculous supporting cast. Perhaps Lea Brodie is the less pathetic one. Yes, you get monsters, but the Japanese ones decades older were much better. This tripe makes Harryhausen's SFX - a craftsman in his own right albeit very dated - look better than Matrix, Terminator II and Jurassic Park stitched together. Gummy faced Mcclure makes Arnold look like Laurence Olivier, and Gilmore makes Keanu Reeves better than Al Pacino, go figure.

This was the fourth - and last - fantasy adventure for the actor-director team of Doug McClure and Kevin Connor after THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (1974; undeniably the best of the bunch), AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1976) and THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT (1977).The result - silly and terminally juvenile - is a disappointment: besides wasting a good cast (Daniel Massey, Michael Gothard and Cyd Charisse), the sci-fi trappings of the plot are ill-suited to the material; the hokey monster effects, then, seal the fate of this low-budget venture. In fact, the location shooting (in Malta, no less, and the smaller neighboring island of Gozo) is among the film's few assets!