Podcast: Raiders of Atlantis
A commercially radioactive director under pressure from a dictator made one of the most baffling yet enjoyable action deep cuts of the 80's
99 Cent Rental Podcast
Episode 53: Raiders of Atlantis
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99 Cent Rental is a comedy podcast revisiting the low-budget action, comedy, and science fiction films that clogged video store shelves throughout the 1980s and early 90s.
Every other week, hosts Bryan and Dave White, hosts of the Bring Me The Axe! horror podcast, dive deep into the nearly forgotten world of ninjas, breakdancers, skateboarders, action hero knockoffs, and Cold War paranoia that embodied the excess and over-the-top attitude of the 1980s and celebrate them for everything they were and weren’t.
This week we’re returning to Italy for a look at one of the dumbest, most baffling action movies ever made, Raiders of Atlantis, aka Atlantis Interceptors, from the notorious Ruggero Deodato of Cannibal Holocaust fame.
In this film, a pair of mercenary buddies and a team of scientists from a botched attempt to raise a sunken Russian submarine find themselves stranded on a tropical island in the Atlantic as the feral, violent denizens of lost Atlantis arise from the silent depths of the ocean to reclaim the world. Or something to that effect. It’s a desperate fight to survive against wave after wave of road warrior freaks, an race against time to translate an ancient tablet that will restore the ancient civilization, and an endless series of violent gun battles and if I’m being honest, I’m working overtime to make this movie make sense. It’s 90 minutes of high-flying nonsense but somehow it ends up being a lot of fun.
Shot against the backdrop of Italy’s exploitation film industry struggling to find an alternative to the declining horror and giallo markets, it capitalizes on the then-extremely popular trend of Mad Max ripoffs but also tries to tap in to the world’s hunger for high-adventure by way of cheap Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoffs only to realize that Raiders of the Lost Ark is incredibly hard to copy on budgets laughably smaller than Raiders. At the same time, the Marcos regime in the Philippines is desperate to draw filmmakers to Manila and as Deodato finds out, it’s hard to say no to a totalitarian dictatorship.
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