I predatori di Atlantide

While the archpriest of Zen film, Donald G. Jackson, swears that his films don’t fall into the realm of cliché and can be innovatively unpredictable thanks to the fact that he doesn’t use screenplays, Ruggero Deodato proves that even with a properly goofy script and appropriately degenerate directing, it is possible to put on a very WTF show. I don't believe Raiders of Atlantis was written by the two guys in their fifties who put their names to it, because here the logic of a six-year-old boy’s imagination plays the key role. If viewers let themselves be lured in by the thoroughly deceptive poster and learn nothing else about the film before watching it, it’s not enough to be amazed by the batty twists that occur in scene after scene, by which characters suddenly pop up somewhere, or even what genre the film switches to. Deodato’s work with the film space and the logical and topographical interconnectedness of events between shots causes even the master of the absolute frame, the self-taught purveyor of dreck David A. Prior, to turn pale. The entire film seems almost like a video game due to the fact that the narrative spawns the heroes in bizarre places completely at random and has them solving banal tasks in completely boorish ways. The characters here are not even one-dimensional, but rather sink into themselves through their anti-dimensionality, in which the expert on pre-Columbian languages excels among all of them, coming across as a lobotomised parody of boffins portrayed in movies. The film had a big enough budget to afford all manner of phantasmagorical genre positions, from disaster movie to adventure with sci-fi elements to post-apocalyptic action flick, but the budget was still small enough that the cardboard post-apocalyptic fakery, the special effects (from the childishly made miniatures to the extraordinarily shoddy gore effects) and the practical execution of individual shots induce diaphragm spasms. (14.08.2022)

Ruggero Deodato zeigt hier eine absolute Meisterklasse bei der Produktion von unterhaltsamem Trash-Film. Atlantis Inferno hat eigentlich alles, was man sich von einem postapokalyptischen B-Movie wünscht, und noch ein wenig mehr. Macht es Sinn? Überhaupt nicht. Macht es jedoch Sinn, sie zu sehen? Wenn man einen guten-schlechten Film mit echtem Herz zu schätzen weiß, dann auf jeden Fall! Und die Miniatur-Atlantis unter der Glaskuppel war absolut spitze! (08.06.2022)