Les Cités d'Atlantis

One of the first movies I brought back from the video store as a kid, along with Dune. While I didn't understand the big-budget Dune at the time and was bored to death by its scope, I was absolutely enthralled by the cheesy trash film Warriors of Atlantis. Thanks to the frantic pace (a new monster every ten minutes), there's no way to be bored with it, and the 90 minutes passes by like water, which is in abundance. It takes place under the sea. An octopus puppet drags the ship's crew to the seabed, where they find a magnificent rendering of the vast Atlantis, whose inhabitants are not very friendly. Here, soldiers with tin helmets covering their entire faces (it's not very clear how they can see through them) enslave shipwrecked sailors who grow gills in the local conditions (despite not living directly in the water). Meanwhile, levitating aliens with weird hairstyles brainwash the chosen people by projecting footage of Nazis. And in between, everyone is attacked by rear projections of assorted rubber monsters (dinosaurs, octopuses, giant eels, mud mutants and flying fish), most of which move so slowly that you have to wait a while before they eat you. You can find just about anything you can think of that might be there in Atlantis. This overwrought variation on Verne is the culmination of a series of fantastic Kevin Connor films. It's an overstuffed hodgepodge of everything from Connor's previous films and a whole lot more. The film's plot is cleverly set in the Victorian era, when people could still believe in the existence of lost worlds, and its old-fashioned naivety and childlike innocence will playfully take you back to when you were twelve. You'll then enjoy a non-stop parade of spectacularly bad visual effects, guys in rubber costumes and failed attempts at humour that are hilarious in their unfunnyness. What more could you ask for on a Sunday afternoon? (25/06/2016)