What gets me is that Patrick Wayne thought having sex with a woman wasn’t family friendly, but stealing the pearls off that woman’s corpse in the middle of her funeral procession was.
His father was still alive at the time, so maybe he was afraid he’d get a whuppin’.
A woman wrote this screenplay, I think. I kind of do AND don’t want to know what it might have looked like before the final version. 
So in essence… the No Moral Theater quote from Mixed-Up Zombies is applicable here?
Geez, the movie gave us some plot points and left it to us to attempt to connect them.
Does the movie have to do all the work around here? 
I think so. Instead of giving us something to make the movie’s purpose clear, they pulled the rug out from under us and we’re left scratching our heads.
Here’s the thing: The pearls are the McGuffin. They bring the characters together. They drive the plot, insomuch as there is a plot, and ultimately they don’t get used.
Except that the tribe doesn’t seem to care about the pearls at all. They know the outsiders value them, and they make for nice decorations, but that’s it.
So the plot we end up with goes like this:
The pearls are incredibly rare and valuable. Manuel has had a steady supply of them for months or more, but no one has bothered to ask where he gets them until Eddie. So Eddie gets the crew together. They go out to the island to get all the pearls. And the islanders are just like “Well, normally we kill any outsider we find, but we really need the princess to have sex with one of you. So stay as long as you like. Take as many pearls as you like. As long as you don’t come inland, it’s fine.” And so they fill a suitcase full of pearls. And then decide to go inland to blow up the temple. A bunch of people die in the ensuing fight. And then Eddie and crew leave, with all the pearls. Except they lose them. Life’s funny that way. The end.
It really feels like there was supposed to be a part where the islanders refuse to give them the pearls. And have a reason for literally anything they do. And that just got left out somehow.
Oh, but while I’m here… @TeriG, do you remember the Rifftrax film that was also made in the Philippines and I think maybe had Manuel in it as the cab driver, and they didn’t get a permit so there are a bunch of chase scenes shot from weird angles where they’re running through crowds of pedestrians who have no idea they’re being filmed and at one point one of their cars hits a guy and they just keep going like nothing happened? I’m blanking on the name. But it’s in the same rough category of films as this one.
The funny thing is that apparently this one had an unusually high budget for the Philippines. Because underwater filming is expensive. Except that almost nothing actually happens underwater. And the whole film flopped. They thought they had a stellar script, but… I guess it got lost in translation. Even though everyone speaks English.
LIke I said, I think in this case what they meant was “suitable for airing on US broadcast television” rather than “suitable for children.” People acting immoral is okay. (And Logan stole the pearls, not Vic.) Some violence is okay. But nudity, swearing, and explicit gore are not.
Someone brought it up before, but what you’re looking for is Beast of the Yellow Night.
Cinematic Titanic did another one of these movies shot in the Philippines, Danger on Tiki Island. I think the more common title for the movie is Brides of Blood.
I mentioned Beast of the Yellow Night above. That’s a horror movie with the actor who played Manuel playing a minor role. An American soldier who has done evil things is turned into a demon of local lore.
Wonder Women. That’s the one. Thank you.
This movie does have a single redeeming quality: all you need to do is to exploit the phobia (e.g., crabs) of the main baddie (e.g., East Eddy) to turn him into a background character. And, I learned something today. 
There’s a strong possibility that this movie is the hodge-podge of a number of script revisions, especially considering the changes that happened after Patrick Wanye signed on. Some stuff may have been revised during the shoot as well.
Also, the script is maybe more understandable as a screenwriter just working scene from scene, trying to establish certain story beats without a care for characterization or coherency.
So they wanted to make the story about a “lost tribe,” and people coming across them for the first time. They made them decedents of Atlantis to make it slightly more interesting. So the first scenes establish why they’re still considered “lost,” they kill all outsiders, while also establishing a link back to civilization with Syrene making trips, and the pearls as the MacGuffin. Also, they want the tribe to be noticeably different, hence the bug eyes, but they don’t want the main tribe characters to have them, hence the “missing link” storyline, where they breed with outsiders on occasion.
So then we have Manuel sell the links to Eddie, who gets the idea to harvest pearls directly from the source. Why does Eddie get this idea now? Is this the first time Manual has sold pearls? No, but Eddie just took over his old buyer’s territory. Eddie recruits in a diver, who then recruits in another diver and boat captain. But wait, what about the Atlantis angle? None of those 3 are going to be that interested, or give any exposition about the tribe or Greek history or anything, so they need a “doctor” character, so how does the doctor get involved? Oh, just by pure chance, overhearing them in a bar. And why would any of the three give the doc a second look? Why, make her a woman of course. This could also set up a potential love triangle between the two divers. There’s no forward thinking, or backwards thinking, just writing what’s necessary to get to the next plot point.
For example, if Syrene is making monthly trips to civilization to get other supplies, she’s had a TON of opportunities to leave her tribe, if she wanted. Just go on one of the supply trips with a good amount of pearls, which she knows has value to outsiders, and just never come back. But no, her father suddenly imposes a command to mate NOW, even though if it was so urgent, she could’ve had sex with the outsider from the beginning before they killed him, or slept with someone while on the excursion to the outside world. But the writer wants to establish tension and a love triangle for the end of the film, so the two women in the story are suddenly in love with the same man, no establishing in previous scenes at all.
It’s like with the final scene, where the movie wanted to end on a lighter, comedic note, so have Vic fail to retrieve the chest of pearls, and then pitches a plan to recover the chest ('the coral’s only 50 ft deep, if [the chest] didn’t go over the edge, but even if it did a team of divers could cover the whole reef it in a couple of weeks.) It’s a very Italian Job type ending, and if it was tied to a different movie, a lighter take on a pearl expedition, it’d be fine. The problem is this comes after a series of fights and betrayals and double crosses, along with the extinction of an entire tribe of people, so it’s total tonal whiplash.
Each individual scene makes sense on its own, it’s only in combination with the scenes before and after that the total lack of coherence makes them incomprehensible in context.
Yeah, why is Eddie laughing? After all they just went through to get the pearls he values so much, I would think he’d want 'em back. A lot.
And especially, why is Manuel laughing? He just tried to double-cross a brutal crime lord and failed. His corpse is about to join the box of pearls down on the reef. I would think his sense of humor would be muted right now.
It would only make sense if it was all a prank on Vic… they had Manuel pretend to double cross them and then staged a fight to lose the box overboard (with the pearls all safely moved elsewhere) so they could laugh at Vic for making a fool of himself diving after them.
I’ve seen the movie twice (once unriffed and once riffed).
All I remember is crabs, big eyes, swimming, the LOLZ ending… oh yeah and lots of closeups of Leigh Christian’s butt.
If there was anything else to that movie I must have missed it.
Much like a chunk of Adam Sandler movies, this feels like an excuse to go on a vacation.
Bravo. That’s a lot more sense than I could make of it.
I’ll add that it seems like the deadline for Syrene has always been there. Perhaps even the reason she’s been allowed to go to Manuel’s island. Her dad is frustrated and impatient. He says she’s had ample time to choose an outsider to made with, and she’s just refused to do so. So he puts his foot down. Pick one of these or else. You’re not allowed to love him and keep him. We just need to keep the bloodline going.
Except that she doesn’t want to be a single mom. She wants to fall in love and get married and not have the weight of the world (or at least the future of the whole tribe) on her shoulders. Not unlike many other stories where the prince/princess wants to escape the duties of the crown and live an idyllic life as a regular person.
You’re right, though. She could have run off. Left the supplies on the beach and gone back with Manuel, if she wanted to make sure they were delivered and the people had enough to get by until they could make another arrangement. Seems like she was holding out for love? I think? But also seems like she’d have much more of a pick if she ran away with a bag of pearls and went exploring. Then again, she’d probably have just been ripped off and, at best, left stranded with no one to help her. She does say she wants Vic to protect her and look out for her.
As for the final laugh… It’s Logan who dives in the water, not Vic, isn’t it? Logan, who has spent the entire movie chasing after pearls and more pearls even when the others were willing to call it a day and come back for more later. But every time he has, things have gotten worse. They’ve just barely escaped the island with their lives. And then had a mutiny on their hands to boot. And then lost the pearls overboard because they were fighting over them. And so the idea of going on another expedition to try to retrieve them from the bottom of the ocean when they don’t even have a way to mark the coordinates of where they were lost just seems ridiculous. A literal sunken cost fallacy from the guy who simply refused to learn when to call it a day. Vic is the one who laughs first, and then the others realize how stupid and pointless it would be to keep going.
This is one of the things this movie actually got right. Just like gold to some New World people, it was nice to look at and abundant so they didn’t value it the way white people did. It certainly wasn’t worth killing people over or even disrupting a funeral.
IDK. Maybe. I can’t tell. Because we’re not given any information.
Is it that they value the pearls, which is why they use them to decorate their most sacred objects? But they’ve come to realize that they’re so inbred they’re at risk of extinction, so their priorities have shifted?
Or is it that the pearls are a cultural tradition to which they don’t ascribe further value?
Or is it that the pearls are abundant so they don’t really care about them much at all?
Are they trying to protect the secret of the pearls? Of why the pearls grow here in abundance but nowhere else? Seems like their ancestors who possibly lived in Atlantis had the pearls, too, and that was possibly on a different island, possibly thousands of miles away. Is there a secret to the pearls at all?
If the writers had an explanation in mind, they don’t seem to have even hinted at it in the final cut.
I’m still trying to imagine how I’d feel if I’d paid for a ticket to this mess.
“But the was NO OYSTER.” 