Warlords Of Atlantis

Bell To Hell

Warlords Of Atlantis
Directed by Kevin Connor
UK 1978
EMI
Imprint Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Full on spoilers I’m afraid.

The fourth and final film in Imprint’s Tales Of Adventure Collection 9, a collection celebrating the British fantasy films of Doug McClure, is Warlords Of Atlantis. Now, I never liked this film as a kid, I’ll say that up front. And it’s easy to see why I was so disappointed. Two simple words... Star Wars. 

I’d seen the George Lucas opus as it was released in the UK, right in the last week of 1977 and, well... anything else which didn’t live up to that film (which changed cinema forever, for bad or worse, depending on what particular aspect of the art/business you are examining) wasn't going to hold my attention for very long. No droids, nobody spraying laser beams at each other, no spaceship dogfights. Unfair to poor old Warlords Of Atlantis, for sure but, yeah, in this case, to this 10 year old boy... timing was everything. 

Anyway, I don’t remember sitting through it again since (even on the telly when it used to get shown regularly during the holiday seasons in the 1980s), so I really wasn’t expecting much from it now. 

I was very surprised, therefore, that I found this one more than held it’s own with two of the previous movies in this set, not to mention walking all over The People That Time Forgot (reviewed here) in terms of being an interesting movie. 

Set in 1896, the film’s two main stars are Doug McClure and Peter Gilmore as the brawn and brains team searching a certain part of the ocean for, unknown to McClure, the lost city of Atlantis. They go down in a diving bell and actually find it, while the crew in the ship above are split into two factions and trying to kill each other because of a big, gold, Atlantean statue they’ve sent up. Then they are dragged into Atlantis, along with the majority of the crew on the ship above (who are attacked by a giant octopus), under a cave in the ocean and out into one of the five surviving cities of Atlantis. 

Populated by Atlanteans who, pretty much on all accounts, seem friendly but mean them some harm. Gilmore is segregated and the two Atlantean ‘chief warlords’ (just trying to make any sense of the title here folks), played by Raymond Massey and, in her last film, Cyd Charisse, put a future seeing helmet on him and intend to drain his brain, after showing him sights of the future such as Hitler’s Third Reich which they plan to instigate (which makes you wonder if anyone learns anything after the conclusion of this movie). 

Meanwhile, Doug McClure and the surviving sailors... including Shane Rimmer playing against type (and with a beard, no less) and a young, villanous John Ratzenberger (four years before he became the regular character Cliff on Cheers)... team up with the former crewmembers of the Marie Celeste and other ships. These include McClure’s sexy love interest played by Lea Brodie (and her astonishingly adorable cleavage, shots of her used from this film in the opening credits of much missed Saturday children's TV show Tiswas) with future replacement M, James Bond’s boss, Robert Brown, playing her father (before he gets quickly devoured by a giant monster). These people have been altered and given gills so they can never leave the place of their imprisonment but, they all help in an attempt to get the heroes and villains of the upper world to make their escape, while various monsters are attacking Atlantis. And of course, adventurous, not bad for the budget, shenanigans ensue.

Now then, I wasn’t expecting much from this but, the film is interesting in the decisions it takes because, yeah, it really is dark. For instance, the girl remains behind at the end because, as I said, they’ve all been surgically altered to have to stay in Atlantis (even though they’re all breathing air in their environments, so that makes absolutely no sense!) and some of the villains of the crew get away with no consequences for their scoundrel actions either. The story just seems to heap on misfortune after misfortune but, grim as it is, McClure gives the film some uplift when it’s needed. And there’s also some unintentional humour along the way too. For instance, most of the monsters look splendid but, towards the end of the movie, when McClure and co are trying to escape Atlantis, they are attacked by a constant barrage of flying coelacanths, which looks pretty silly and you can imagine the crew just throwing them into shot at the actors off camera.

Other things of note? 

Well, there’s an absolutely brilliant jump scare in the early sequences of the movie, when a big aquatic dinosaur pops it’s head up into the bottom of the diving bell (numerous times, in fact) and tries to eat McClure and Gilmore. I wasn’t expecting it from a film like this and, yeah, it really got me. I was delighted I actually jumped. 

What else? Okay... the colours and shot compositions in the film look absolutely amazing, especially in the scenes in the higher echelons of the city, where columns shaped like inverted pyramids purport to hold the structure up and the director and cinematographer make much, brilliant use of the many diagonals to frame the various characters. 

One last thing... the Atlanteans are depicted as an alien race who have come to Earth from a dying Mars. Now the writer of this film is none other than Brian Hayles, who you may or may not remember was, eleven years prior to this movie, the original creator and writer of the Doctor Who villains, The Ice Warriors... who also hailed from that same planet. So Hayles must have had an interest in Mars at the time, I reckon. 

But that’s me about done with Warlords Of Atlantis and, I’m delighted to say I had an absolutely splendid time with it, in general, this time around. My one regret is that the film Peter Cushing was shooting at the time over-ran and so he couldn’t join this one and renew his working relationship with McClure, as was originally intended. But, this is still a nice little example (perhaps one of the last hurrahs) of British adventure fantasy of this type to get a release in cinemas and, yeah, I think it works really well. The superbly transferred Imprint disc is a little lighter on extras than the others in the set and I can’t help but think that if UK label Indicator had got hold of these, they would probably have also included the Super 8 digest versions of the movies as well. Still, this particular Tales Of Adventure box is a superb treat for fans of these kinds of cinematic marvels and Imprint have done a wonderful job. So thank you Imprint... can we have some more old serials now please?

The Land That Time Forgot

The Lost Whirled

The Land That Time Forgot
Directed by Kevin Connor
UK/USA 1975
Amicus
Imprint Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Ending spoilers.

The Land That Time Forgot is the first of two movies based on a trilogy of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, the two sequel books being The People That Time Forgot (also made into a movie) and Out Of Time’s Abyss.

One of the co-writers of the screenplay is Michael Moorcock, perhaps best known for his various multiverse novels about different aspects of The Eternal Champion, such as Elric Of Melnibone, Dorian Hawkmoon and Jerry Cornelius. Which perhaps comes as no surprise because, if memory serves, he was once an active member of the British Edgar Rice Burroughs Society. Of this film he has apparently gone on record in saying that the last 20 minutes of the film deviates wildly from the novel, due to interference by the studio.

The film stars Doug McClure as Burroughs’ hero Bowen Tyler and is set contemporaneously to when the book was written during the First World War (I believe). This one starts off when a German Submarine…  commanded by officers played by the likes of John McEnery and the future reincarnation of The Master in Doctor Who himself, Anthony Ainley… sinks a ship carrying Tyler, his love interest played by Susan Penhaligon, the ship’s Captain played by Keith Barron and a few other of a handful of survivors, who temporarily manage to take command of the U-Boat themselves for a short while.

Various shenanigans and power plays ensue until the two crews pitch up on an island populated by various dinosaurs and cavemen, representing different areas of the island in a strange set of boundaries representing, even on the life at a microbial level, different time periods in Earth’s history. At which point the two surviving sets of crew members start to work together to find a way out of the vicinity of the island as soon as possible.

I remember missing this film at the cinema when I was a kid so, when I saw the sequel a couple of years later, I was a bit confused when Doug McClure’s character suddenly turns up halfway through the film. I must have seen this film at some point in the 1980s but didn’t remember much about it when I finally got around to watching Imprint’s lovely new edition in a box set with three other similar films featuring McClure from this period. A quick shout out to anybody else who bought this Tales Of Adventure Collection 9 set within the first six months or so… the original disc of this film issued in this set has a bad VHS master of a truncated TV print which looks absolutely terrible. You will need to talk to Imprint who have now repressed the disc with the correct print and transfer on it.

Now, I was expecting the effects in this film to look absolutely appalling now but, Amicus were spending their biggest ever budget at this point and they had Derek Meddings on board as their secret weapon. So obviously the miniatures look terrific and the puppet dinosaurs look, mostly, pretty good. Now I’m not saying, as my mum did when we watched this one together, that the effects are better than Jurassic Park but, they’re not bad either and certainly not as bad as later films in this cycle. Although the first shot of the pterodactyls, three of them flying in a circle, did look a little bit like an infant’s mobile hanging above the bed.

That being said, I was genuinely impressed by the illusion created by the camera work and the editing to and from the dinosaurs and was especially impressed by the social commentary in the movie, such as when a dying styracosaurus is filmed in close up and a tear is seen falling from its eye.

And then we get to the ending of the film, which would have driven me mad if I’d seen it in the cinema when it opened. Almost the entire crew leaves in the sub, which gets destroyed in a, possibly sentient, volcano... killing them all. Only Doug McClure and Susan Penhaligon are left surviving, stranded on the island in 1916, tossing the flask carrying the narration for the movie we’ve just seen inside of it.

So Amicus presumably had their eye on the sequel, at least. A sequel I remember as not being nearly as good as this movie. But, I have to say, I really enjoyed this one, The Land That Time Forgot, more than I have than at any other time I’ve watched it and I have to give credit to Australian label Imprint for being the only game in town to date where I can actually pick up a copy of this British/American co-production on blu ray. So well done to them.