Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Ava-Grace Willis Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

JohnHowardReid Passable Pal. The story is not particularly engaging. Made up of elements from Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, H.G. Wells' Island of Doctor Moreau and Homer's Iliad - with a few slices of pseudo Old Testament thrown in - it seems both overly trite and tediously familiar.The acting is no great shakes either. For a change - not a welcome change so far as this reviewer is concerned - it is the male lead who spends most of his screen time displaying his physique, whilst the heroine remains far more demurely clothed throughout. This seems to be Mr Hall's only movie - which doesn't surprise me. True, the girls may think he's a good-looking lad, but he can't act for toffee, and has all the charisma and usefulness of a pistonless bicycle pump.Miss Holden is slightly more appealing. This was her second or third film and she did go on to enjoy a very modest career in the 60s. The support players, led by an appropriately villainous John Dall, have more to offer, with Berry Kroeger excelling as the vicious "surgeon".Pal's flat, lazily unimaginative direction with its plentitude of monotonously dull close-ups doesn't help the dialogue scenes any. Fortunately, the director has handled his action material in a more vigorous manner. The "ordeal by fire and water" packs a moderately exciting wallop. This and other sequences are further spiced by a few impressive sets and dazzling props.Of course it's neither the story itself nor the stars that will attract customers to Atlantis. It's the allure of those destructive-earthquake-watery-grave special effects implicit in the title. Despite some extremely obvious shortcomings and budgetary limitations - crude make-up for the human animals; easily recognizable crowd, arena, forum and fire shots from Quo Vadis; glaringly miniature buildings made of cardboard - the destruction of Atlantis is just impressive enough to justify the price of admission. Just!OTHER VIEWS: Berry Kroeger plays a wizard who turns slaves into pigs. We love the scene in which he compels one of his victims to repeat after him: "Every day, in every way, I'm getting to be a boar!" Climax aside, it would be difficult to think up a more acurate description of the movie itself. It held such promise too, but as it slowly unfolds, the story gets less and less involving, the acting more and more wooden. A bore indeed! - JHR writing as George Addison

bkoganbing At the age of 14 I liked Atlantis, The Lost Continent because I had 14 year old tastes at the time it was in theater. George Pal produced a really neat show for juveniles and it came out at a time when Italian studios were turning out dozens of these films based on classical ancient times. Looking at it more than five decades later I can now appreciate the great cast of character players brought in to support a pair of less than charismatic leads. Any film that has John Dall, Edward Platt, Berry Kroeger, Frank DeKova, Jay Novello, and Edgar Stehli should not be missed.Our leads are Anthony Hall as Demetrios a poor but humble Greek fisherman who catches Joyce Taylor a princess from a far away land. She's run away because she doesn't want to marry Dall and considering he's more than a bit off kilter who could blame her. She still insists on royal prerogatives in dealing even with her rescuer.In the end Hall takes his little fishing boat beyond those Pillars of Hercules at the mouth of the Mediterranean and they find Atlantis or Atlantis actually finds them in a metallic submarine that Dall is captaining. After that Hall is taken to the island of Atlantis where Edgar Stehli is the king, Taylor his daughter, Kroeger a mad scientist physician who has created a race of mutants, DeKova the court astrologer and Platt a priest. Each one of these people gets to strut the stuff that we expect from them. Pal gave them all their heads and they run with it. As an adult this is what I love this picture for.Especially Dall working that death ray machine. The man is truly achieving orgasm as he zaps people into non-existence with a phaser like device. The Atlanteans all dress in classical Peplum style, but have made some really far advances.Juveniles will still love it, many adults will too. But as Atlantis falls, didn't someone think to save that submarine. Whoever did would be ruling the planet.

mark.waltz Once upon a time, sometime prior to Christopher Columbus, an island existed in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that was as big as Australia and was more advanced than the ancient European cultures that knew nothing of its existence. This continent, once the model of goodness in its exploration of scientific knowledge and a free society, has become corrupt with the desire for world domination. A young Gerek fisherman by the name of Demetrius discovers this when he escorts Atlantis's beautiful princess back through the dangerous towers of Hercules (actually a bunch of towering rocks protruding out of the Atlantic) into a watery mist he fears. Demetrius has visions of Poseidon, and attacks a pre-mature submarine, believing it to be a sea monster. The Atlantis he finds hates outsiders, turning those who come upon the island by accident into hideous monsters, slaves of the rock piles. They can fight for their freedom by going up against a Tor Johnson like strongman in a pit of fire and water.Silly, yes; Entertaining, certainly! With George Pal ("War of the Worlds") at the help, this is another variation of the protests towards the dangers of powers discovered within the past few decades (most obviously nuclear power), the source of this caused by crystals taken from an active volcano. It is this volcano that is the revenge on the imperious pretender to the throne, having usurped power from the aging King, and determined to destroy the Greco-Roman world before they come along and destroy Atlantis. Ed Platt ("Get Smart!") plays the local priest, a Godly man who warns of the impending doom. Once everything erupts, Pal explodes the volcano with the fairly convincing blue screen special effects which literally seem to turn the island upside down, like an Atlantic Sodom and Gomorrah.The laughable narration at the beginning tries to explain some of the legend of the lost civilization, but it is the straight forward production moving the plot forward that makes this an above average fantasy, worth its place in history, especially along side the many similar films being (overly) made today about the great myths of the past.

rlroyal I remember seeing this when it was first released many years ago & when George Pal was a household name. I recently had a chance to see it again on TCM and considering the time that has elapsed, some of the special effects still look OK.Being much older I now realize the acting skills of some of the players leave a lot to be desired but all in all it is still an enjoyable film despite the "steals" from Quo Vadis & elsewhere.When I was a kid the final destruction scene gripped me and I never forgot the "laser" gun frying the bad egg on the steps and the smiling skeleton dropping down. Funny now how I now notice the saw line around the head & thinking how is it the bones survived the blast on that occasion but when Zaran was picking off the boats it was complete disintegration. One can't be too picky though he must have had real good eyesight to catch sight of the hero & damsel in the teeming crowds, smoke and flames.