Voyage to the Bottom of the Bargain Basement

I hate to say it, but since the Horror Channel went to Freeview I am getting a lot less done than I used to, especially in the evenings. Where I would once have stuck on Radio 4 or one of the BBC channels as a backdrop to whatever it was I was doing, now the teatime default is Horror and an episode of TNG (or possibly CBS Action and original series Trek if the TNG on offer is especially irksome), followed by Incredible Hulk (more recently Highlander: The Series) and then a couple of episodes of Doctor Who, bizarrely scheduled so a four-part story always runs over three evenings. One effect of this has been to turn Doctor Who into an element of the background hum of my life: I’m routinely watching most of two or three stories a week without even thinking about it, so I’ve stopped sitting down and watching the DVDs in a state of (oh dear, sorry) mindfulness, which is why the Who content on the blog has dropped away a bit (apologies to the two or three people who actually enjoyed reading that stuff).

Still, set against this we have the opportunity to enjoy a range of classic old horror movies – Quatermass and the Pit, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, Asylum, all on at relatively accessible times (even as I type they are showing Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde) – and also some pretty terrible films to snigger at too. Just the other day was a triple-bill of Stonehenge Apocalypse (wherein someone snaps ‘Get me authorisation for a nuclear strike on Stonehenge!’, and this is far from the stupidest bit), Grizzly (a showing of this on ITV twenty years ago was preceded by an apology from the network ‘for the poor quality of this film’), and Warlords of Atlantis, which…

Well, hang on, I’m not sure whether Warlords of Atlantis shouldn’t go into the ‘classic of yesteryear’ category. This is very far from being a respectable film nowadays, but it was the 15^th highest-grossing movie in the UK for 1978 – I know times have changed, but being 15^th in 2014 would have put you ahead of proper big movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Interstellar – so there’s clearly something going on here that audiences liked. On the other hand, this is what some members of my family always used to call a ‘Trampas movie’, by which they meant that it features Doug McClure having a fistfight with someone while a rubber monster waddles around in the distance.

Like the other Trampas movies, this one was directed by Kevin Connor, though the series’ previous association with Amicus was perforce concluded by the winding up of the company. Beyond the fact that this is an original story rather than a raid on Edgar Rice Burroughs, any changes in content are not immediately obvious. On this occasion McClure is playing two-fisted bathyscape engineer Greg Collinson, who has been retained by marine archaeologist Charles Aitken (Peter Gilmore, famous at the time for The Onedin Line) and his dad, who are secretly searching for… well, the movie’s called Warlords of Atlantis, take a wild guess (the setting is, as usual, vaguely late-Victorian). Not entirely surprisingly, given the pedigree of the series, their diving bell is soon under attack by a rubber monster, soon after which they discover a mysterious golden statue.

When the statue is winched aboard the ship chartered by the Aitkens, the avaricious deckhands plot to get rich quick by killing Collinson and the archaeologists and keeping it for themselves, but before the mutiny can properly get going the ship is attacked by a giant octopus (no, really) and the crew are dragged beneath the waves – Collinson and Aitken get pulled along in the diving bell, too.

They all wake up in, you guessed it, Atlantis, which on this occasion looks rather like Malta, mainly because that’s where the location filming was done. Atlantis turns out to be an oppressive sort of place, with human slaves under the thumb of a ruling elite from, and you may not have seen this bit coming, Mars. One of the main duties of the slaves is to defend the outlying Atlantean cities from marauding rubber monsters called Zaargs (the titles include the wonderful credit ‘Monsters by Roger Dicken’).

I don’t know, what’s wrong with our culture today? I can’t imagine anyone having the nerve to feature monsters called Zaargs in a new movie. People are just too concerned about being laughed at and would rather be all post- and meta- when it comes to that sort of thing. I may start a Campaign for Proper Monsters (or possibly Real Zaargs) in new movies. More Zaargs, less meta!

Anyway, the Martians whisk Aitken off to join their intellectual elite, which is Atlantean for ‘have his mind painfully extracted’, while Trampas and the rest are slung in a dungeon for fraternising with local slave girl Delphine (Lea Brodie) who was abducted off the Mary Celeste with her dad (Robert Brown). A fortuitous attack of the Zaargs allows them to escape, but naturally they have to attempt to rescue Aitken before going back to the diving bell and trying to get back to the surface.

Well, all right, much of Warlords of Atlantis definitely falls into the ‘unintentionally amusing’ camp, with camp very definitely being the operative word. But I find it almost impossible to be too hard on a movie which features a scene in which the principal cast wander stoically across a sound-stage while crew members hurl flying piranha fish at them from behind the camera, while the giant octopus attacks which bookend the film have a sort of kitsch grandeur to them. The fact that this is one of the very final examples of a certain kind of earnest British fantasy film also predisposes me to like it, too.

Of course, this is also a movie made with an eye on the lucrative American market, hence some of the more bizarre casting decisions: not just McClure in the lead, either. Prominently cast as the senior management of Atlantis are Daniel Massey and, most preposterously of all, Cyd Charisse, in one of her final movie appearances. Charisse was of course best-known as a dancer and for her spectacular legs, which may be why the fashion sense of the Atlanteans tends towards the extremely brief hemline. Further down the cast list are a couple of actors well-known for playing Americans in British productions, Shane Rimmer and John Ratzenberger, making this the only film in which Scott Tracy from Thunderbirds and Cliff from Cheers wrestle a rubber octopus together.

All that said, this is a surprisingly lavish-looking movie, mainly due to the location filming on Malta and some half-decent matte paintings of the Atlantean interior. On the other hand, the script (by Brian Hayles, at one point a noted Doctor Who scribe) is clumpingly obvious and possibly even a bit primitive in places. The script started life under the title Seven Cities to Atlantis, and the cities have embarrassingly obvious names like Troya (the third city), Vaar (the fourth city), Chinqua (the fifth city) and so on.  The Martians stick a sort of glass bucket on Charles’ head at one point to show him the hellish technocratic superstate they plan to engineer on Earth, and he has visions of… a commercial  for a British Airways Concorde and a British Rail Intercity 125. Hmmm. I wonder what the Atlantean word for bathos is.

Oh, but I’m kicking it again and I don’t want to. Of course it doesn’t make any sense, and of course it’s wildly silly and – if we’re honest – more than a bit all over the place. There’s a lot here to enjoy and very little to offend or upset, and it is, as I say, pretty much the last of its breed, so cherishable in its own way. It’s a bad movie, true. But it’s a good bad movie.