Journey Beneath the Desert (1961)

Original title: Antinea, l'Amante della Citta Sepolta

Directors: Giuseppe Masini, Edgar G. Ulmer, Frank Borzage

Writers: Pierre Benoit, Remigio Del Grosso, Ugo Liberatore, Andre Tabet

Composer: Carlo Rustichelli

More info: IMDb

Tagline: The atomic age blasts open the lost city of Atlantis

Plot: A helicopter crashes in the desert, and the crew winds up in the underground city of Atlantis and get mixed up in a slave revolt.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again?  No.

This action adventure spends a little too much time with the drama and setup before it gets to the action and fun.  The first third of this 90 minute flick takes our heroes from crashing a helicopter in the desert to finding the lost city of Atlantis below the desert.  Once they're there, it's a lot more fun.  The set design and art design is fantastic. 

Those columns are extraordinary, aren't they?  One thing I got a kick out of was seeing one of the heroes sneaking around the caverns and coming across this ceremony where a man is lowered from the ceiling in a steel horizontal cage to be further lowered into a pit of molten gold and come up a human statue.  It sounds and looks like that familiar scene from INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984).

The cast does a fine job and Carlo Rustichelli's score is very good.  The action sequence that is most impressive is when our heroes escape being enslaved in the mines.  They blast a hole in the wall, escape with machine guns in the water-flooded tunnels and make their way through a man-sized hole to the outside.  It's another moment that is reminiscent of TEMPLE OF DOOM.  It's a great sequence and it's the kind of thing that would be a blast to watch in a theater with the smell of popcorn running about.  It's not a bad way to kill 90 minutes on some rainy afternoon.