Beyond Atlantis

• Also known as Sea Creatures or Sea People
• Directed by Eddie Romero
• April 18, 1973

A band of adventurers invade an island to get a reported fortune in treasure. Very family friendly.

Beyond Atlantis is best described as an experience. We have a casual adventure to rob an island with bug-eyed inhabitants that send out a hot blonde to mate with a random guy though I was baffled largely over why. Was she a trader of some type because she was the only one that looked normal and needed to make babies to continue? And how does Atlantis fit in with all this. Not even sure it was mentioned as a thing. That in a family friendly story featuring Sid Haig as a pimp.

Every now and then the blonde hottie Syrene (Leigh Christian) comes to the mainland and pays in high-quality pearls. How long she or others have been doing this is uncertain, but it seems like it would be difficult to keep the secret of whatever is going on in any place if you kept paying in something that was very valuable. Her people may not have understood the monetary system of the rest of the World, but even the most inexperienced child knows when something has value.

I’m not the first to have said this but the film itself plays like it’s moving in slow motion. I am forced to agree with those assessments. It is filled with beautiful underwater photography that brings the narrative to a crawl. That is in conjunction with a pace that stays at a casual stroll and never picks even as it closes in on the climax. So much of what the viewer see adds up to nothing. It comes off as an extended special episode of some generic action-adventure series rather than a small budgeted theatrical presentation. 

I watch this thing from start to finish and am completely mystified how Atlantis fits into all this. You could kind of take the featured tribe as being connected to Atlantis, but they’re also extremely inbred maybe though nothing really says they are. All but two of the members of the tribe have these weird eyes that I’m sure the prosthetics to used to accomplish blinded the people hired to wear them which may have been a blessing given how silly they look.

Sid Haig aside, Patrick Wayne is the second biggest name in this movie. He lacked the distinctive features and general personality of Haig. Cast alongside John Ashley playing the slimy Logan, Ashley looks a great deal like Wayne making their actions in a lazily written script get jumbled together. The lines and actions were interchangeable.

The highlight of this movie is just how bad the acting can get. Scratch that. There is no acting in this mostly. These people (Wayne and Haig aside) for all I know worked in film and theater and television but never made it beyond salesclerk number one or woman in crowd. And if they did they just didn’t care here.

The treasure these guys are after are some amazing pearls. I don’t think we see any kind of oyster, real or imagined, in this movie at all. These pearls are very high-quality but so numerous they are virtually worthless to those outside the insular world.

This lacks a distinct personality or any aesthetic that gives it a guilty pleasure feel or a kind of charm that makes it enjoyable. It’s slow but strangely not boring. Conversely, it’s not interesting either. It’s crafted in such a way that it feels like it’s about to get good but never does and never can.

Beyond Atlantis is a weird creature that is not boring yet not interesting. It’s a film that moves at a normal pace while feeling like a slow motion story. Ultimately a curiosity but not one worth seeking out.