Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		1.5

Beyond Atlantis Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 16, 2019

Sometimes it’s hard not to love the synopses that the IMDb provides for certain films. Witness this most excellent if somewhat misleading précis from that site about Beyond Atlantis:

A band of adventurers invade a native island determined to grab a reported fortune in buried treasure. The islanders are just as determined to keep their sacred treasure. Complications ensue.

“Complications ensue” indeed, and that summary doesn’t even get into what might be thought of as some “Splash-esque” plot dynamics that ultimately unspool. In fact that brief overview from the IMDb sounds like any number of adventure films, including a great old 1940 outing called South of Pago Pago which I came to courtesy of my longstanding fascination with Frances Farmer, but which also features “a band of adventurers” who indeed invade a native island and are determined to grab a reported fortune in buried treasure. “Complications ensue” in that film as well, though admittedly there are no amphibious creatures involved, even if the natives in that film are able to dive rather spectacularly deep (something that ends up killing some of them).

Eddie Romero and John Ashley made a number of films together in the Philippines, including Brides of Blood, Mad Doctor of Blood Island and Beast of Blood (all available as part of the box set The Blood Island Collection). The Philippines was a locale that Ashley reportedly more or less “retreated” to after his divorce from Deborah Walley, as is covered in supplements on this release as well as in some of the other Ashley/Romero outings that have made it to Blu-ray and include supplemental material. At that point in his career, Ashley had become something of an entrepreneur, running some theaters in the middle of the United States, something that provided him with built in “exploitation” opportunities for whatever productions he was involved in. A lot of the Romero/Ashley films were undeniably provocative, featuring copious amounts of nudity and often pretty frankly sexual vignettes, but interestingly, the addition of Patrick Wayne in Beyond Atlantis came with some kind of contractual obligation to keep things on the more demure side for this particular film, something that Ashley evidently felt contributed to Beyond Atlantis’s less than stellar box office returns.

The admittedly tenuous connection between Beyond Atlantis and South of Pago Pago arguably continues since the “treasure” at hand turns out to be priceless pearls hidden deep in ocean waters, and in fact chief villain East Eddie (Sid Haig, memorable as always) actually comes off as rather similar to one of the earlier film’s bad guys, Williams (Douglas Dumbrille), down to his pencil mustache. Beyond Atlantis is a good deal smarmier, though, offering East Eddie as a pimp on the wild and wooly streets of the Philippines, who finds out about the priceless treasure and ends up getting divers Vic Mathias (Patrick Wayne) and Logan (John Ashley) involved to get some of it.

Where Beyond Atlantis finds its truly peculiar and distinctive aspect is that the natives on this particular island are supposedly descended from Atlantis. A bunch of them have “fish eyes” (as can be made out in some of the screenshots accompanying this review), something that adds an undeniably comic element to even some supposedly very serious moments (like the execution of an interloper early in the film). Luckily for our heroes, though, Syrene (Leigh Christian) is thankfully free of this disfigurement, and even better, she needs to mate with a human in order to propagate her species. As some wise summary writer once summarized, complications ensue.

Beyond Atlantis is kind of curiously uninvolving despite some of its more gonzo plot dynamics, and even Ashley evidently felt the film was too slow and lacking in “exploitation” opportunities. It’s fitfully interesting in a “train wreck” kind of way, but it’s probably the least entertaining of the often very odd Romero-Ashley collaborations.

Beyond Atlantis Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Beyond Atlantis is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of MVD Visual and VCI with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.87:1. While there are none of the rather odd encoding anomalies that have afflicted some previous VCI outings on Blu-ray, and while VCI is touting a 2K scan off of the original camera negative for this release, as can perhaps be gleaned from some of the screenshots accompanying this review, color timing is fairly variable here, and there is once again a rather filtered look, at least in some shots. Some of this transfer looks very good indeed, with a healthy reproduction of the palette and decent detail levels even when grain is more or less missing in action, but there is quite a bit of this transfer that either looks brown or kind of an odd peach hue that might be described as "part pink, part yellow". Clarity is also occasionally widely variant, at times even within the same scenes. Grain is evident, at least in passing, especially in some of the outdoor material, where it can look a tad yellow at times, even when not exacerbated by opticals.

Beyond Atlantis Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Beyond Atlantis features an LPCM 2.0 mono track that has somewhat limited dynamic range, but which provides perfectly adequate support for the film's dialogue (such as it is), as well as the rather long "underwater ballet" scenes that typically feature flourishes of Ed Norton's score. The track is rather narrow sounding, and doesn't have a ton of "oomph" in the low end, but there's no major damage to report.

Beyond Atlantis Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Original Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:15)


• Television Spots (1080p; 1:26)


• John Ashley Remembered (1080p; 13:35) is another snippet culled from interviews done for Mark Hartley's 2010 documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed, and contains some sweet remembrances of the actor and his long sojourn in the Philippines.


• Photo and Pressbook Gallery (1080p; 2:53) offers a number of motion controlled shots of the pressbook, so it's best to have your Pause button handy in case you want to read anything.


• Commentary is found under the Setup Menu and features Howard S. Berger and Andrew Leavold (who is literally phoning it in from the Philippines, so the difference in audio quality is noticeable).

Berger also contributes an essay which is found printed on the inside of the cover.

Beyond Atlantis Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Howard S. Berger's writing found on the inside cover of this release makes a perhaps questionable connection between this film and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, while also throwing in the probably more understandable Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, though that CinemaScope offering from days of yore had a budget which even then probably easily dwarfed the paltry monies Beyond Atlantis secured for its filming. Berger is an unabashed fan of Beyond Atlantis, but even he closes his comments by stating the film is "just a bit nuts". I'd probably aver that it's more than "just a bit" nuts, but unfortunately even the undeniable craziness of some elements of Beyond Atlantis isn't able to fully overcome a pretty lethargic pace and some unevenness. The technical merits of VCI's Blu-ray output continue to improve, though fans of this film are encouraged to carefully parse the screenshots accompanying this review to get an idea of how this looks.