Huh. I never thought I'd actually grow to love a Ruggero Deodato film. My experience with Deodato has primarily been the second-hand experience of knowing people who have actually sat themselves down and watched Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. To be honest, I'm sure I myself will find the strength to watch Cannibal Holocaust at some point, since I made it through Cannibal Ferox and all--I'm not overly concerned with the human violence in Cannibal Holocaust, even if I know I have my limits. What worries me more about Holocaust and Deodato in general is the animal cruelty that would become a hallmark of the Amazon Cannibal subgenre...I keep my movies in the realm of fiction. If you start breaking out into reality with some of your stunts, then eyebrows are going to be raised. I made the mistake of following the trails of breadcrumbs that fanned out from the animal slaughter depicted in Cannibal Holocaust and found that Deodato was actually still one of the lighter of the Italian exploitation filmmakers--at least he didn't actually participate in human trafficking, or show real executions, like his comrade Franco Prosperi. Even so I wasn't prepared to forgive Deodato anytime soon. Today's movie, The Raiders of Atlantis, presents to me a paradox I've also run into with Prosperi, which is that I have actually found one of his movies that I like. (In Prosperi's case, I was a fan of his weird killer creatures movie Wild Beasts before I found out about some of his doings.) The Raiders of Atlantis is an unexpectedly entertaining action film, wildly disconnected and yet bizarrely sober all at once. Kinda makes you forget that the guy who made it was a colossal A-hole.
The year is 1994, in Miami Florida a bunch of mercenaries are killing dudes. They include Mike Ross and a man whose name is Mohamed but whom everyone insists on calling Washington. After they are done killing dudes and getting paid for it, we cut to a scientist, Kathy, who has been called from her Central American archaeological work to examine a 12,000 year old tablet of unknown origin. Suddenly, in the wake of the crash of a Russian nuclear submarine, Atlantis rises from the ocean, and as it does so, a group of biker punks, led by a guy in a really cool semi-transparent skull mask, begin killing people. They shoot a housewife in the neck with an arrow and dispose of her husband shortly thereafter. You may not believe it (I sure didn't), but this all comes together and leads to the bulk of the film's content, wherein the mercenaries and scientists battle the punks with a seemingly-endless supply of Molotov cocktails, which they keep kissing before throwing. In the end, however, none of it makes sense, least of all the bullshit explanation that a radiation leak on the Russian sub somehow caused Atlantis to rise from the ocean.
Where do I start? Maybe at the beginning...these opening credits really caught me off-guard. The theme that plays over these credits was jarringly similar to the theme from Yor, Hunter from the Future. It turns out this is due to the simple fact that both songs are done by the Oliver Onions, a band which along with Goblin ended up scoring a lot of European exploitation through the '70s and '80s. It doesn't help that the theme the Spoony One plays on his old Rebuary videos is the theme from The Raiders of Atlantis, even as he's showing footage from Yor, which is probably where I got confused. In any case, I allowed myself to believe for the first ten minutes of this film that Deodato had just stolen the theme from Yor and cut out all the parts that talk about the titular Yor. That would have been the funniest thing since Bruno Mattei stole the Dawn of the Dead theme for Hell of the Living Dead.
Actually, this movie's dialogue feels like Mattei's...it has that Claudio Fragasso fragrance to it. And I may in fact be selling Raiders of Atlantis a little short, as the dialogue occasionally exceeds the lunacy of the Mattei/Fragasso combo. Take for example this exchange between Mike and Kathy:
Mike: "You gotta be like Popeye. Eat your spinach."
Kathy: "I like spinach too!"
Mike: "Well, tell you what. When we're back ashore, and this is all over...I'll take you out to a spinach dinner."
...I'm sorry, what?
That's some Carlos Tobalina shit right there. A spinach dinner? Is spinach by itself really a meal? Is there a restaurant that would comply with a request for just spinach? Is that already an option on their menu? Are they going to be eaten their spinach raw or cooked? If the former, are they at least going to put dressing and croutons on their spinach, or does their love of spinach eclipse any culinary value they could derive from such? As remarkable as this exchange is...it comes back at the ending. This was considered by the screenwriter to be a big moment in the relationship of these characters.
This isn't even disjointed; this is all the joints taken out of the bones, and reassembled into something weird and spider-y. Individual moments, save for the ludicrous dialogue, work by themselves, but this film in no way becomes a gestalt. There is no unification between the punk plot, the Atlantis plot, and the mercenary plot, save for the fact that they are all in this movie. And Deodato definitively succeeds at distracting us from how these plots in no way overlap by smothering us with endless awesome action sequences, ablaze with tripwire decapitations and napalm.
Finally...returning somewhat to the character of Mohamed. It's true that only Italian exploitation directors could make a movie this illogical, but it also took an Italian studio to make an action movie where the hero, or one of the big heroes, is a black Muslim who lives all the way to the end. Seriously, I've yet to see such a thing outside out of, well, the film markets of the Islamic world, and so for this and for everything else he does in the movie, Mohamed is now one of my favorite action movie heroes ever. Let him be one of yours, too!
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