Submarine Seahawk

dumb dialogue, lousy acting, silly story, overly dramatic background music. It ends up being a satire or caricature of all the good submarine movies even though they were being serious when they made it.

It uses every cliché of a submarine movie, crew members going nuts, sneaking thru minefields, torpedoes that miss, the captain following orders in conflict with the crew, getting depth charged, having to make repairs while the enemy is around.

It's not a crew I would want to go to sea with, untrained, undisciplined. The main plot is implausible. I could see a movie of this quality coming out 20 years earlier when they cranked out propaganda movies for the war. The character development needs a little work. I'm not surprised the actors are unfamiliar to anybody.

From humble beginnings this movie proved to be fairly engrossing, because you can't be sure which way it will go. It creates characters with some real human characteristics, both good and bad, and you will keep watching to find out just how they measure up to the rigours of submarine warfare. Sure it is low budget, but it still manages more realism and is more believable than many of today's Hollywood blockbusters.

No problem with the sound quality or general image quality, and the battle scenes and submarine manoeuvres are fairly impressive. Some of the opening scenes which try to inject a bit of levity will seem a bit forced and dated to today's eyes, but this film is unusual in that it gets better as it proceeds, with the best bits at the end.

Submarine Seahawk is one of those films that you or I could put together with some stock footage and a knowledge of all the clichés involved in making a submarine motion picture.

The U.S.S. Seahawk has a mission and it looks like a suicide one. Under new skipper John Bentley, they're to go into a secret Japanese base and report when the task force is being refitted. Then the Americans are to pull their own Pearl Harbor.

For reasons only the writers know, the purpose of the mission is kept secret from the crew. Why, God only knows, because where's everybody going to go and tell once they're at sea. So the crew is grumbling why they're going out of the way to avoid engaging the enemy.

John Bentley, Brett Halsey and the rest of the no name cast deserve some kind of medal for wading through this tripe and delivering some kind of decent performances. All the clichés involving submarine films are alive and thriving in Submarine Seahawk.

Will they come home from the mission? Watch the film if you dare and care.

"Submarine Seahawk" is the sort of war film that should be pretty awful. After all, it reuses some footage from another film, is made by American-International Pictures, a couple of the characters are indifferentlbroadly written and the budget is minimal...with mostly no-name actors. Yet, despite this, it's surprisingly effective and worth seeing...even if it does currently have a paltry 4.9 overall rating.

The film begins with the crew of the Seahawk sinking a Japanese ship with their final torpedo. But instead of meeting up with a nearby supply depot for more torpedoes, the ship is ordered to Pearl Harbor. Once they arrive, they learn why. The ship's commander is being given a promotion to a desk job and the cold and generally disliked Lt. Commander Turner is being given command. While the skipper wanted one of his other officers to receive command, he was informed that Turner is needed because he is so knowledgeable about Japanese ships....and their next mission is NOT to sink boats but to do reconnaissance. It seems that the Japanese have pulled all their best ships out of action and the US command wants to know where these boats are.

With these orders, the crew is not happy. After all, they want to sink ships. And at least initially, they hate that Turner is avoiding fights and is only interested in relaying his reports back to Pearl. What's next? See the film.

Apart from a couple characters who are one dimensional, such as Lt. Shore and the nerdy seaman, the film actually worked well. The prior footage was integrated well and despite the cast being unknowns, the acting was pretty good. Underrated and worth seeing.

When one Lieutenant Commander Paul Turner (John Bentley) unexpectedly gets assigned the lead of the Submarine Seahawk for an important undercover mission (to find out where missing Japanese warships are being hidden), the crew becomes more and more anxious as Turner again and again refuses to fire on enemy ships while taking them further and further into dangerous enemy territory.

This is decent enough entertainment for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon if one is in the mood for a submarine war adventure tale. A couple of familiar faces in the cast doesn't hurt any either nor does some of the early lighter scenes which help us to identify more with the crew.