Best movie ever!

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

This kind of cheesy adventure yarn was a staple of my youth - and every time I see one of these films, it brings a tide of nostalgia pouring through me. WARLORDS OF ATLANTIS is a film which just wouldn't stand up to a modern audience's viewing - it's not politically correct, the acting is poor, and the special effects not particularly effective. But to a child, the film becomes a wonderful story of monsters, aliens, and plenty of protracted fight scenes. The film starts off well with an excellently animated octopus attacking a boat and dragging the survivors to a new world. This octopus attack is really quite splendid, okay so it's not original but the model effects really do look good. After there things can only go downhill, but there are still plenty of laughs and fun to be had as our heroes enter a weird society of primitive gill-men and alien rulers.The chief nasty bloke in this case is Michael Gothard, a man who lent his unique persona to such schlock as SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN and the respectable JACK THE RIPPER before committing suicide in the early '90s. He always reminded me of a British Klaus Kinski. Gothard is at his sneering best here as the evil alien commander, although sadly he is given far too little screen time and not much to do apart from stand around and bark orders. Opposing him as the face of good is a solid Doug McClure, whose shirt gets torn off yet again and who pushes his way through the film with his own brand of wooden acting. He might have his critics (and many of them), but for me, McClure will always be a hero. Much like modern action stars, he's a man who never gets injured, who always wins out in the end. and who gets to fight loads of baddies and monsters single-handedly.Which brings me on to the monsters, which look a lot like dinosaurs. Sadly these are of the back-projected variety (the cost of the octopus must have eaten the budget), and even if they look quite nice, the projection does look awful, much like in AT THE EARTH'S CORE. You can almost smell the rubber on some of these monsters. The film reaches new depths with an attack of flying fish (a truly unbelievable scene), but I quite liked a toothy snake thing which came out of a swamp to grab somebody's leg. If your idea of fun is a cheesy and amusing film, then this one is for you. Packed with effects and action scenes which seem to go on forever, any child would love it. I would rate it as better than AT THE EARTH'S CORE, but not quite as good as that all-time favourite, THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT.

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!

!!!!! MILD SPOILERS !!!!! In my review of AT THE EARTH'S core I said that the best of these Doug McClure gets attacked by rubber monsters in a 1970s British movie was THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT . If this holds true - And it's been years since I saw that movie - then WARLORDS OF ATLANTIS is certainly the second best in the genre Written by former DOCTOR WHO script writer Brian Hayles the story has some imagination even though no one is going to confuse it with a documentary . An eclectic ship's crew is abducted by a giant octopus and taken to the ancient city of Atlantis which is ruled by an alien civilisation which is engaged in a war of attrition against giant rubber monsters . One of the abductees Professor Aitken is wanted by the aliens for his superior intellect while the others will be used as slaves . It also turns out the abductees must be converted into gill breathers within a few days if they are to survive their new environment . Naturally upon hearing this the ships crew don't want to stay in their new home An entertaining enough story and unlike AT THE EARTHS CORE the production values are fairly good since location filming involving oceans and caves are used . There is the old bug bear of actors standing in front of obvious back projection trying to look scared at a rubber glove pocket but that's not enough to ruin the movie , in fact that adds some charm and the script has the temerity to point out that mankind's greatest achievements have come out of fighting one another in terrible wars . There are one or two plot holes like why do the aliens consider Professor Aitken a man of superior intellect since he would have no understanding of space travel or Einstiens theory of relativity , in other words he's a cave man compared to the aliens . You also can't help but notice that when the characters escape Atlantis Delphine the female lead has been rather superfluous to the plot But these minor flaws are never enough to totally ruin the movie for a discerning audience and I have noticed how many comments on this page centre around " I saw this when I was a kid and I'd love to see it again so please bring it out on DVD " It's probably nowhere as good as you remember it from 20 years ago but it still remains a fairly entertaining movie