Raiders Of Atlantis 1983 Story and screenplay by Vincenzo Mannino and Dardano Sacchetti, directed by Ruggero Deodato. The Italian title is The Atlantis Interceptors.
After releasing Cannibal Holocaust director Deodato was embroiled in a controversy about the graphic violence and animal cruelty. Animals being killed on screen was one of the problems, some thought it was a snuff film, the human killings were so realistic. Deodato was arrested and charged with murder. He lost his film making license and had to explain how he did the effects. He even had to produce the actors in court to show they were still alive.
The same year Deodato made The House On The Edge Of The Park, a vague remake of The Last House On The Left. It got put on a list of video nasties in the UK and was heavily cut. Like Cannibal Holocaust it's got a lot of gore, sexual violence and brutal murdering. I don't find films about human monsters appealing and don't care for either of them.
Deodato didn't get his film makers license back for three years and he filmed The Atlantic Interceptors. It starts off pretty ordinary, some guys are helping some scientists to raise a German submarine from the ocean floor. Somehow this causes the sunken island of Atlantis to rise. It's been under a dome for all these centuries and it's ready to take it's rightful place on land. Part of that rightful place involves getting rid of the human population already settled on land.
Ordinary ends and Deodato is back to his gory murdering ways as a vicious gang of Atlantian soldiers rage over an island city. Deodato has seen Mad Max and somehow he can't not copy those costumes. The rising of Atlantis caused a big storm and our main characters are washed up on the island that the Atlantians are attacking. This has taken less than a day and somehow the Atlantians have already got all sorts of tricked out motor bikes and old cars. Where they got them is one of the many unanswered questions that the film leaves hanging.
There's plenty of action, gun battles, explosions, people getting hacked up, all that sort of thing but it's not interesting enough to make up for the stinky script. Another one that I'm not going to bother buying. I won't need to see it again.
Endgame 1983 Written by Alex carver and Joe D'Amato, directed by Joe D'Amato. Joe directed almost 200 films in his career, most of the ones I've see have been mostly pretty poor. Much of his later work was porn, both hardcore and softcore. Joe used a lot of pseudonyms in his career, trying to keep his directing work separate from his cinematography work.
He didn't do very well with Endgame either, it's a poorly thought out post-apocalypse film, New York is a wasteland but it has a TV network. Endgame is a popular show on the network, hunters track and kill their human prey. The prey can fight back and Al Cliver is a guy who's survived several hunts. There's a threat from the mutant population, those in charge send teams to hunt them down, the mutants have allies who try to help them survive and move away to safety.
Al gets hired to guard a lot of mutants, mostly telepaths, and he hires a few guys to help him. They run across other groups of humans, most of them bent on murder. There's lots of fighting, gun battles, and interminable driving about. It's got a poor script, some parts are absolutely ludicrous, add some lousy production values and it's a real stinker. Still, it was a smidge better than the previous movie but not one I would need to buy.
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