Queen Antinea (Haya Harareet) is the evil queen in the 1961 Italian Peplum film, "Journey Beneath the Desert".
In the movie, a helicopter crew of three mining engineers are flying over the Sahara Desert, when they are rerouted around an atomic test site. The copter is forced down during a terrible storm and they crash in the desert. They take refuge is the caves of some rocks, and end up in the underground city of Atlantis. Here they get mixed up in court intrigue and a slave revolt.
They meet Antinea, the last Queen of Atlantis, who has the habit of killing all her lovers and encasing them in gold. She has quite a collection of gilded men. Antinea has quite an array of exotic looking headdresses and there is one bath scene that is quite seductive. Antinea does a sexy dance with a python, and also has a pet leopard that she uses as a threat to attack.
The three member crew goes in three separate directions. John (Georges Riviere), the helicopter pilot, attempts to escape. He is caught, tortured to death, and then in an elaborate ceremony, dipped into a vat of gold, which turns hi into a statue. Robert (Rad Fulton) attacks Antinea for killing John, and is punished by becoming a slave in the mines until he gets his hands on a machine gun.
Ultimately, she pits Pierre (Jean-Louis Trintignant) against Robert, who has rebuffed the Queen's advances. Pierre kills his best friend out of jealousy. One of Antinea's handmaidens, Tanit Zero, helps St. Avit escape from Atlantis. Pierre arrives back at the outpost to tell his story, then crazed fro the love of Antinea, returns to the Sahara in search of Atlantis, only to die in a sandstorm. Antinea and her people and the city of Atlantis are destroyed by the nuclear bomb testing.
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