by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Mars movie screenings (http://marsmovieguide.com/) was an odd
pairing of two pretty cheap movies — though the second one was considerably
better than the first, with a higher production budget, better actors and much
more convincing special effects. The first one was a 1964 cheapie called The
Wizard of Mars, which is so off the radar
that the proprietor was showing it from a VHS tape. That had been shown at the
screening in August 2017 — though the person running the screening missed it on
his Web search of his own site and thought he hadn’t run it since 2012, which
explained why he’d decided to run so tacky a movie so soon. You can read the
gory details on my moviemagg blog post from back then, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-wizard-of-mars-aka-horrors-of-red.html,
and all I’d care to add is that the acting (aside from John Carradine, who was
top-billed but the producers could only afford one day of his services, so they
used him in front of a black screen so they could show him as a disembodied
head à la The Wizard of Oz — this
film was supposed to be a pastiche
of that classic but doesn’t really work as such, or as anything else for that
matter — oracularly declaiming endless and ponderous exposition) is pretty
terrible and Eve Bernhardt as the spaceship’s one female crew member, Dorothy, so far
as the other end of the talent scale from Judy Garland, is the worst. Her dialogue
delivery is such perfect porn-star monotony one wonders whom she was sleeping
with to get the part! The other movie on the bill, The Warlords of
Atlantis, was made in 1978 and is
considerably better: directed by Kevin Connor from what appears to be an original
script by Brian Hayles, it’s set in 1896 and stars Doug McClure, who at the
same time was making sci-fi films based on Edgar Rice Burroughs novels like At
the Earth’s Core and The People
That Time Forgot. The Warlords of
Atlantis, though not based on a Burroughs
work, was clearly in the same sensibility. A wealthy professor of antiquities,
Professor Aitken (Donald Bisset), has chartered a small ship, the Texas
Rose (an improbable name for a vessel
home-ported in Boston; when it’s wrecked at the end of the film I joked that
the surviving cast members would be rescued by the Massachusetts Rose out of Galveston!), with a diving bell with no cover
in the bottom. This seems to have been Hayles’ idea that if you didn’t seal the
bottom of your diving bell, your divers would have the air trapped in the thing
as it sank and therefore wouldn’t need pumps to feed them air through hoses so
they could stay submerged. Not so, says one imdb.com “Trivia” poster: “An open
diving bell cannot go very deep unless it is pressurised. For an open diving
bell it would require increasing volumes of air to be pumped into it. Without
pressurisation, the air inside the bell would be at the same pressure as the
water — it would literally crush the bell but not until all occupants had been
squeezed to death.”
The Texas Rose,
under the command of crusty old sea-salt captain Daniels (Shane Rimmer) and
with a crew of two or three other guys (two fully grown males and one adorable
twink whose purpose isn’t readily apparent until the very end, though we can
have a lot of fon speculating),
sails to the Bermuda Triangle to look for evidence of the lost cities of
Atlantis. It’s possible the main reason writer Hayles and director Connor made
the diving bell open at the bottom is so the filmmakers could have the two
people inside, Greg Collinson (Doug McClure), the diving bell’s inventor; and
the scientist’s son, Charles Aitken (Peter Gilmore, who did more for me as an
actor and a personality than McClure did), menaced by a giant prehistoric sea
creature before the film’s main intrigue begins. (This film was made three
years after Jaws and it looks
like Connor was quite closely copying Steven Spielberg’s set-ups and the
overall approach.) The film’s main intrigue involves a giant sea storm and various
giant creatures who emerge to menace the Texas Rose and the diving bell it launches. Ultimately the
little craft is sucked under the depths of the sea through a set of undersea
caves until it emerges into a nice little patch of dry land and normally breathable
air. Collinson and the junior Aitken have no idea what it was or how they got
there, but it turns out they’re in Troi, one of the five remaining cities of
the seven that originally comprised the lost continent of Atlantis (you
remember). Atlantis is ruled by two monarchs who both get “guest star” credits
because they come from a far more prestigious part of the movie world than the
ones who generated the rest of the cast: Cyd Charisse as Queen Atsil and Daniel
Massey (nephew of Raymond Massey, who played Noël Coward in Star!) as Atraxon, who seems to be her prime minister.
Their presence puts the rest of the Warlords of Atlantis cast one degree of separation from Fred Astaire,
Gene Kelly and Julie Andrews!
Eventually the intrepid explorers find out that much of the population of
Atlantis has been abducted from Earth’s surface, imprisoned in a dungeon, then
subjected (unwillingly) to a mysterious operation and outfitted with breathing
gills behind their ears. As I pointed out in my own imdb.com “Goofs” post, this
is ridiculous. If the gills were designed to replace the normal lung-based
system land-based creatures use to breathe, the people couldn’t survive in the
environment we see, which is dry land and normal air. And if they were designed
to supplement the people’s lungs and nose instead of replacing them, the people
could still breathe surface air and they wouldn’t have to worry about dying if
they tried to escape. Either way, it’s wrong.
Warlords of Atlantis is essentially a succession of scenes with the
actors doing battle with various giant menaces, some of them based on really
existing sea animals (including the hugely upscaled octopus who serves a deus
ex machina function at both the beginning
and the end of the film — more on that later) and some of them the creations of
Roger Dickens, who gets a well-deserved special credit for “monsters” aside
from the rest of the effects crew. At the end — or at least what appears to be the end — the good guys escape Atlantis in the
diving bell as it navigates through an underground stream containing a
succession of geysers, and I was expecting one of the geysers would catch the
open underside of the craft and propel it out of Atlantis and back to the
surface world like a rocket, but no such luck and it’s not all that clear how
the people in the diving bell do
get back to the surface — whereupon writer Hayles and director Connor have another trick to pull on us. Before the principals made it
into Atlantis, the Texas Rose was
the subject of a mutiny by three assistant crew members because Collinson and
Aitken, Jr. had brought up a giant Atlantean totem of solid gold, and the
mutineers want to steal it, sail back to a normal human community and either
sell the totem itself or melt it down and sell the gold. After the principals
get back to the Texas Rose, it
turns out that crusty old Captain Daniels (who seemed in the early sequences to
be aimed at being this film’s equivalent to Robert Shaw’s characters in Jaws and The Deep, another maritime melodrama made in the 1970’s and set in the
Bermuda Triangle) has decided to throw in with the mutineers, kill the Aitkens
and Collinson, and join in whatever treasure the others realize on the gold —
only, wouldn’t you know it, that giant octopus comes in, kills the bad characters
and recovers the gold totem (which in the octopus’s giant arm looks oddly like
a chess piece), while the good characters end up in a lifeboat and force the
would-be mutineers to swim behind it and push it along. The End — no, there’s
no indication of how (or even whether) the principals get rescued. In addition
to this film, which they list as Warlords of the Deep, imdb.com lists another project called Warlords of Atlantis as “in development,” though it’s unclear whether
it’s going to be a remake of this one or an entirely different story.
Warlords
of Atlantis is a silly movie, and it’s very
much “of its time” (particularly the cheesy music that accompanies the Texas
Rose as it sails in the opening sequences)
— it even has anachronisms like “emergency back-up plan,” a phrase I’m pretty
sure wasn’t in use in 1896 — but at the same time it’s engaging and there are
some clever bits, like the one in which the warlords of Atlantis are explaining
their plan to emerge from their underground (and underwater) caverns, conquer
the surface world and develop nuclear weapons so they can enslave the whole
galaxy. In an attempt to recruit Charles Aitken for this sinister plan, they
put a globe on his head and use it to show him movies of Nazi Germany
(represented by stock footage from Triumph of the Will — which, as usual when it’s used this way, shows how
much greater Leni Riefenstahl was as a director, no matter what you think of
her horrible politics, than the “B” filmmakers whose cheesy films her great
scenes got shoved into) and nuclear bomb tests. Only Collinson manages to smash
the globe from his head and thus end the brainwashing attempt — and of course
as the globe smashed I couldn’t help but mutter under my breath, “Rosebud.”
When I looked up Warlords of Atlantis on imdb.com the review that came up was from “phil-626,” an
over-the-top fan of the film who gave it the maximum 10 stars and wrote, “Made
before the onset of CGI effects, this film has an innocent, non-cynical feel.
It has monsters, the lost city of Atlantis, guns, fight scenes and more
monsters, what more can you ask for in a low budget sci-fi. Films like this are
often belittled by people who cannot see beyond their De Niro’s and Oscar
nominations.” Well, I like a good monster-fest as much as anyone, but there are
quite a few movies in that genre
I’d rate above this one, including the original 1933 King Kong (the winner and still the champ!), the 1954 Japanese cut of Gojira (the original Godzilla and the only real rival to 1933’s King
Kong), Ray Harryhausen’s The
Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason
and the Argonauts, and more recently the
first 1993 Jurassic Park. And in
case you’re wondering how Warlords of Atlantis fit in with a Mars film screening, there’s
apparently one fugitive line of dialogue that identifies the Atlanteans as
originally being from Mars, but the connection was so tenuous that even the
person running the screening wondered whether it belonged in his Mars movie
collection.
