What I’ve Been Watching: The Atomic Submarine (1959).
Who’s Responsible: Spencer G[ordon] Bennet (director); Orville H. Hampton (screenwriter); Arthur Franz, Dick Foran, Brett Halsey (stars).
Why I Watched It: See below.
Seen It Before? Long ago.
Likelihood of Seeing It Again (1-10): 8.
Likelihood the Guys Will Rib Me for Watching It (1-10): 2.
Totally Subjective BOF Rating (1-10): 5.
And? This is part of my Self-Imposed Laserdisc-Viewing/Exercise Regimen (hereinafter SILVER), whereby I am working my way systematically through my LDs while riding my stationary bike. In some cases, that will mean forcing myself to watch stuff I’ve been putting off for years, but in others, it’s a welcome opportunity to revisit films I remember fondly, albeit hazily here. In particular, I’m hoping to confirm this definitively—as we did with the obscure Euro-horror entry The Murder Clinic (1966)—as the source of an image that has been locked in my friend Gilbert’s memory since childhood, in this case an “eyeball monster” that I think may well be the inhabitant of this film’s flying saucer.
The story is set in a then-near future when sub-Arctic civilian and military shipping has become commonplace, yet is now threatened by a series of unexplained disasters. Cmdr. Dan Wendover (Foran) is sent to investigate, his titular Tiger Shark packed with special weapons, gear (e.g., an experimental mini-sub), and personnel, including two underwater-demolition frogmen and noted egghead Sir Ian Hunt (Tom Conway). Not all the baggage they carry is literal, because Dan’s exec, Lt. Cmdr. Richard “Reef” Holloway (Franz), has an iceberg-sized chip on his shoulder about the alleged pacifism of Dr. Carl Neilson, Jr. (Halsey), who created the Lungfish with his revered father and is its only qualified pilot.
Things get weird around the 40-minute mark as the Shark spots, and fires two torpedoes at, the undersea UFO—whose design prompts the nickname Cyclops—only to have one inexplicably miss and the other stop dead in a mass of apparent gel surrounding it; oddly, no mention is made of these two live nuclear weapons thereafter. Dan, favoring a direct approach, rams Cyclops, which everyone naively assumes has “killed” it, but the prow of the sub has lodged within it, so the Lungfish is dispatched to try to cut them loose. In the event, “killed” is more accurate than they realize, because Cyclops is not only inhabited by our tentacled eyeball but also alive and, more important, capable of regenerating itself.
This minor SF feature is a footnote to Bennet’s reign as the “King of Serial Directors” on Superman (1948), Batman and Robin (1949), et al., but the cast is headed by a quartet of the usual suspects. Screenwriter Hampton ground out The Alligator People and The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake that same year, and has genre credits dating back to additional dialogue for Rocketship X-M (1950), which teamed FX mainstays Irving Block and Jack Rabin. That prolific pair designed and created this film’s effects with frequent partner Louis DeWitt, penned the uncredited story (per the IMDb), and worked on countless ’50s efforts such as Flight to Mars (1951) and Kronos (1957), plus the series Men into Space.
The male lead in the Rabin/Block Invaders from Mars (1953) and Jack Arnold’s Monster on the Campus (1958), Franz was cast by Edward Dmytryk in The Caine Mutiny (1954) and others, while Foran took a break from the saddle as Steve Banning in The Mummy’s Hand (1940) and …Tomb (1942). Although he ironically worked with Mario Bava only on the spaghetti Western Roy Colt and Winchester Jack (1970) and the sex comedy Four Times That Night (1971), Halsey did star in Return of the Fly (1959). Conway was, of course, a veteran of Val Lewton’s Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim (both 1943), and succeeded his brother, George Sanders, as the Falcon.
The supporting cast could have wandered in from one of the many war/sub movies this recalls in its early reels; naturally, I know sagebrush star Bob Steele, playing CPO “Grif” Griffin, best as Canino in The Big Sleep (1946). An early fixture at AIP, producing such Roger Corman efforts as Day the World Ended (1955) before going independent, Alex (brother of Richard) Gordon also wrote Jail Bait (1954) and Bride of the Monster (1955) with Ed Wood. But it is the Rabin/Block team—whose last feature this was—that makes it memorable, the micro-budget’s struggle to live up to their ideas giving it a ramshackle weirdness that I find of greater interest than a more conventional, empirically better film.
Carl’s passengers enter Cyclops through an iris (get it?) hatch and find…nothing, a plain black set with lighted ramps anticipating the Outer Limits episode “Nightmare.” The rest are either fried by unspecified means or crushed in the iris, but after the alien hand puppet (voiced by John Hilliard) tells Reef they like Earth best of all the planets considered for colonization, and by the way would love some human specimens, he fires a Very pistol into its eye. The Shark is extricated while it regenerates—via reverse footage—and when Cyclops flies off, a hastily rejiggered ICBM soon sets things right, leaving Reef and Carl to mend fences, hoping that their victory will forestall further visits from the evil aliens.
The laserdisc co-feature, Richard Gordon’s First Man into Space (1959), just…isn’t…very…interesting.
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