The film your’re thinking of with taxi driver Manual is Wonder Women starring Ross Hagen( Sidehackers ) and Sid Haig. Rifftrax did it and it is awesome.
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you would feel the cast was laughing AT YOU at the end.
lol
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THAT’S WHAT I’M SAYING
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THIRD BASE!!
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Beyond Atlantis: Msties, you’re a fine lot/what good friends you would be/but my life, my love and my lady/is incoherence-y
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We repeat: Logan has taken all the speed.
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Remember these “american movies” were many times written/directed by Filipinos 
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I was Mighty Jack-levels of confused, and I have to respect that.
(Loved this episode, by the bye.)
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But Mighty Jack actually makes sense. And the parts that don’t make sense are mostly due to the “movie” being what I like to call a Sandy Frankenstein Monster. It was a TV show with a serial plot, but Sandy Frank took two non-consecutive pieces, stitched them together, and gave them a lurching new life as a movie. Which then had pieces cut for time by MST3K. Same thing happened with Time of the Apes.
Beyond Atlantis is supposed to be a single coherent movie, and it’s just not.
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Very fair points, sure enough.
Beyond Atlantis more or less felt like Stuff Happening: The Movie.
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That’s a great title. Except I’m not even sure that stuff does happen.
In any case, I’ll say it again: It’s a solid episode. Great riffing throughout, love the host segments, and they even did a good job picking the movie.
I just like to try to understand the movie on its own terms, and this time I just can’t. I do feel better since @marsilies did as good a job of it as I think it’s possible to do. At least without tracking down the individual writers and shaking them until they talk. But that probably requires a time machine, as well.
(goes to check Charles Eric Johnson, credited as the writer, has no credits after 1992. Ethel W. Fernandez, in charge of continuity, has no credits after Beyond Atlantis. Editor Andrew Herbert has nothing after 1987. Producer John Ashley, who played Logan and was originally slated to direct, died in 1997. The other two producers, Charles S. Swartz and Eddie Romero, died in 2007 and 2013 respectively.)
And yet, when I look at the movie’s Wiki page:
Producer John Ashley admitted that the movie was meant to be a ripoff of The Treasure of Sierra Madre , but he had high hopes for it because he liked the script so much
Ashley said that the original intention was for the lead characters to discover the people living underwater, and “for the most part they were going to be topless”.[8] However Larry Woolner, the head of Dimension Pictures, thought that they had the chance to make a slightly more ambitious film. They wanted to cast Wayne, and one of his requirements was that the film be made PG. They increased the budget and cast another relatively well known name, George Nader.
They had an established story from another movie (released half a century prior). He thought the script was really good. Another guy involved thought they could do even better. Enough to merit significantly increasing the budget.
From that description, it really feels like we should have ended up with something coherent.
Maybe that explains the whole thing with the guest huts, at least? The tribe was going to live underwater. Which maybe also explains why their eyes look so fishy. So they’d need guest huts on land to deal with occasional visitors and trade, and they’d need to be mysterious about where they actually live. And that’s why they have so many pearls and why pearls are their only resource and why they need to buy supplies from a neighboring island when it looks like they should be able to be fairly self-sufficient on their own island.
But then why did they start with a vision of the tribe living in an underwater city, decide to make it more ambitious, with an increased budget for underwater filming, and end up with the tribe apparently living on land? Was it just too difficult and expensive to even pretend the temple was underwater? Or in an air pocket in a large underwater cave? Something?
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Amen on all counts.
I’m absolutely talking smack on the movie, but not on the episode.
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I came here for this post alone.
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Yes. I wrote the title hoping someone would pick up on that. It was very satisfying when I saw it happen. That was indeed the perfect response. Better than I’d anticipated. I love MSTies.
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So they blew up their temple, killed their princess and several tribe members, and then robbed the funeral procession for good measure. And this tribe that regularly kills outsiders just lets them walk away. I was expecting them to ambush the boat from underwater, but they do nothing. I can only assume that a gust of wind blew away half the pages of the script and they just made do with what they had.
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The excuse given was “You’ve taken everything from us. We just don’t care anymore. We have nothing left to fight for. Do whatever you want.” But, yeah. I expected more. Or at least some comeuppance beyond losing the pearls.
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The thing I want to know is:
What happens after the laughing stops?
My brain explodes when I try to imagine how the very next minute after that “ending” would play out in the nonsensical world they created.
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I’ve seen the episode three times and I think I kinda get it. Basically the guys are going to the island to steal pearls. The science lady is there for… reasons? The fisheyed people want to get some outsider genes back into their tribe, so blondie is told by her dad to mate with one of the men. She doesn’t want to because she doesn’t love the guys. The guys are gross pimps and drug dealers who hang out at cock fights, so who can blame her?
I honestly can’t tell who this movie was made for. It’s one of the least charming films ever made.
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Yes! I was just thinking of maybe starting a new thread about that. Let people write what happens next. Give the characters the endings they deserve. Or whatever you feel like writing.
The guys want to steal pearls. Some more than others.
The science lady wants to know the history of the tribe, which is her life’s work. But they won’t tell her, so she blows it up instead. And then feels a little bad about that. But also she and Vic (the least terrible of the guys) fall in love, which sets up a love triangle with the mermaid princess.
The tribe wants fresh genes, but also to stay away from outside influence. For reasons? They’ve got secrets to keep, but they don’t know what or why. Or really anything else about them. But the outsiders take all their pearls (do they care about that?) and blow up their temple and kill their princess who was also their last hope of not inbreeding themselves to extinction. So they give up and wander off into the ocean.
The mermaid princess wants to find true love. A man who will protect her and take care of her and show her the wonders of the outside world where she won’t have the responsibilities of the tribe and won’t be treated like a brood mare. She’ll settle for Vic who is, again, the least terrible of the guys. But he’s taken, which makes her mad. So she roofies him and rapes him and tries to kill the science lady and dies.
After destroying the tribe and their culture and stealing everything from them, the guys proceed to drop the pearls. So they ruined everything and nearly died, all for nothing. It’s funny.
Yeah, I really can’t tell whom this was made for. Why they thought it would make a good movie. What they were even trying to do. There’s supposed to be dramatic tension over the pearls, but there just isn’t. The writers just sort of forgot to put that part in, I guess?
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