Three men in a deep sea diving bell are sent to the bottom of the ocean to
examine the currents, when they notice that all the fish are rapidly
disappearing right before their eyes. Could they be carried away by the currents?
No, it’s an underwater volcano that has just erupted, and spoils their day by
tossing the men around inside the diving bell. Meanwhile, their crack support
crew aboard the ship on the surface are too busy watching the volcano erupt,
like freaking spectators at a football game, to offer any help to these guys. It
looks real bad for this trio--until they’re saved by Captain McKenzie (Joseph
Cotton, who’s seriously slumming here) and the crew of the Alpha, a super-cool
submarine.
McKenzie takes them to a wondrous undersea city, a shining utopia where people of all races and creeds come together and live in peace--and where the women walk around in nothing but scanty, 1960s style bathing suits. Yeah, baby! This truly is paradise on earth! Things go swimmingly until a scientist and his grown daughter are abducted by the Joker--uh, I mean abducted by the evil Dr. Malic, who’s played by Cesar Romero, who played the Joker on the 1960s Batman TV show (and he still has his mustache, too!). This causes Dr. McKenzie to mount a rescue mission--but not before he takes a bath with his entire crew, first (hey, it’s the ‘60s, remember? Free love, and all that).
Produced by the Toho studios in a bid to show that their inherent cinematic silliness wasn’t restricted to just their Godzilla films, Latitude Zero probably would have been a really cool film for me had I seen it when I was eight. It’s loaded with super-cool scenes with ultra-modern (for the 1960s) submarines battling it out underwater, and has plenty of weird looking monsters, like a giant flying lion. The problem is I saw it as an adult, and I can’t quite get over the super mod 1960s atmosphere. It’s easy to see that this movie might have served as one of the inspirations behind the Austin Powers films; but Latitude Zero offers so much silly fun that one can enjoy it as a comedy in and of itself.
One problem I had with the disc is that there are no closed captions, nor are
there subtitles of any kind on the American verion of the film. Which is wrong,
because, after all, deaf people deserve to enjoy crappy movies, too. But for the
record, this deaf person barely noticed what was being said--not because I
couldn’t hear it, but because I was laughing too damn hard at some of the
extreme weirdness, like the garishly colorful costumes that Cotton wears (ascots
galore!), or the hysterically funny scene where the scientist’s daughter
abruptly stands up and screams, "I CAN’T STAND IT!" Believe me, honey, I know
exactly what you mean.
--SF
Main Review Page | Fantasy Reviews |Email Me | Buy This DVD Here (if you must)!
