Dimension 5

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Directed by Franklin Adreon; Produced by Earle Lyon for United Pictures and Harold Goldman Associates, released by Feature Film Corporation of America. Screenplay by Arthur C. PIerce; Photography by Alan Stensvold; Edited by Robert Eisen; Music by Paul Dunlap. Starring: Jeffrey Hunter, France Nuyen, Harold Sakata, Donald Woods, Linda Ho, Robert Ito, David Chow and Deanna Lund.

Foolish and cheap but slick sci-fi/spy film with the gimmick of Jeff wearing a belt which allow him to decompose and transport himself invisibly at will, in time as well as space. This allows him to change history at will. Hilariously dated: Chinese society called Dragon threatens to blow up Los Angeles unless all American forces are withdrawn from Southern Asia. One guy makes a flippant joke that is oddly prophetic: "You're as well protected as our president would be on the way to Peking".

In this spy thriller from United Pictures and director Franklin Adreon, American secret agent Justin Power (Jeffrey Hunter) is teamed with Hong Kong agent Kitty Tsu (France Nuyen) to thwart a Red China terror group known as the Dragon from detonating a hydrogen bomb in Los Angeles. They must find the location of the mysterious crime lord Big Buddha (Harold Sakata), who is also an operative of Dragon, before it's too late.

This dollar store version of a James Bond movie is insipid, slow, and occasionally mildly amusing in its ineptitude. The film's big gimmick is the hero's use of cutting edge time travel technology to jump a few seconds or a couple of weeks forward or backward in time. He's warned by Donald Woods, playing the film's Bond boss M stand-in, that overuse of the time tech (housed conveniently in Hunter's wristwatch) could lead to a "time slip", a simplistic plot device to explain why time travel isn't used repeatedly to solve every little issue the hero comes across. Regardless, we never do see any suffer a time slip, unfortunately.

Harold "Oddjob" Sakata is an unusual boss villain, appearing in a motorized wheelchair, having all of his dialogue dubbed by Paul Frees, and, in one extended sequence, appearing shirtless. Lee Kolima, who looks a lot like Tor Johnson, plays big henchman Genghis, the kind of role Sakata usually played.

The swinging 60s strike again in this mildly - make that VERY mildly - amusing espionage nonsense about a supposedly top notch intelligence agent, Justin Power (Jeffrey Hunter, "The Searchers") who is partnered with a Chinese-American female agent, "Kitty" (France Nuyen, "South Pacific"). Their mission is to foil a criminal organization dubbed The Dragons, which are headed by wheelchair-bound "Big Buddha" (Harold "Oddjob" Sakata, who is dubbed by Paul Frees). The Dragons plan to detonate a bomb in the City of Angels, but the good guys have a secret weapon: a time travel device that can be worn like a belt!

"Dimension 5" is low-tech and minor league, and it's also pretty short on action. Therefore, it's never particularly exciting, but it still has its moments. The give and take between our hero and heroine is enjoyable enough; she's Americanized enough to prefer steak and potatoes to more traditional Asian dishes. He's confident and has a fair amount of swagger. That said, neither of them are THAT smart - he needs to be saved more than once, and at the end, when she has the villain dead to rights, she doesn't kill him when she has the chance. Hunter and Nuyen are both very good looking, which should help to make their characters palatable nevertheless.

They're assisted by a fairly good bunch of supporting actors, including Donald Woods ("The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms"), Robert Ito ('Quincy M.E.'), Jon Lormer ("Creepshow"), Bill Walker ("The Long, Hot Summer"), Tad Horino ("Galaxina"), and Robert Phillips ("The Dirty Dozen"). The filmmaking isn't overly slick but it's passable; this was made by many of the same people behind the previous time travel sci-fi flick, "Cyborg 2087", including director Franklin Adreon.

A watchable, forgettable diversion for an hour and a half.

Five out of 10.

Justin Power (Jeffery Hunter) plays a guy who's supposed to be a super-smart secret agent. Then why is it once he's partnered up with Kitty (France Nuyen) he repeatedly blunders and is rescued time and again by this lady? It's especially amazing considering how often he acts like he is the super-spy and she is his acolyte?!

When the film begins, you learn that the Americans have a cool device that allows agents to jump back in time to the immediate past! They're using this to battle the ever-present Communist Chinese agents who seem bent on destroying America. Eventually he and his fellow agents learn that the Chinese have smuggled in parts to a nuclear bomb. Where in the US it's going to be detonated and by whom is something Power is going to need to discover--paired up with the Hong Kong-based investigator, Kitty. Can they stop the dreaded Big Buddha (Harold Sakata)?

I didn't mind seeing Hunter's character being out-thought by the female agent, but too many times he just seemed arrogant and really dumb...too dumb to live dumb! This is a weakness of the film. While she's obviously smarter than she is, at the end, Kitty is also a complete moron. And, so was Big Buddha for that matter!! However I did like how realistic and pragmatic the Power was, as he was not above slugging a woman or nearly twisting her arm off to get the truth--which makes since considering the Dragon organization is contemplating mass murder! And, I did like Big Buddha's style-- especially when one of his subordinates has the nerve to TELL him what he should do next! Overall, it's a film that had great promise but it really needed some editing to make the characters less like caricatures. I see this as a time- passer and not much more due to the inconsistent writing. In many ways, this plays like an old movie serial than a film that expected the viewer to take it seriously.

By the way, I saw this on YouTube and the print is badly faded--with the print looking sepia hued instead of in vivid color.

Dimension 5 is a strange little movie that combines several different genres. At best, I'd call it harmless enough as it does provide some small degree of entertainment. At worst, I'd call it a mess of movie that attempts to mix sci-fi and romance elements into what is basically a spy movie. The results are underwhelming. The sci-fi is missing from 3/4 of the movie, the romance isn't very believable, and the spy parts are too easily solved or handled.

Dimension 5's plot is a difficult one to summarize. A group called Dragon plans to detonate a nuclear device in Los Angeles if the US doesn't draw down its forces in South East Asia. Agent Justin Power (Jeffrey Hunter) is put on the case. He has at his disposal a time travel belt. He uses knowledge from the future to effect events in the present. He is assigned a partner, Ki Ti Tsu (France Nuyen), from Hong Kong. She is familiar with Dragon. Together, they'll have to discover the mastermind behind Dragon, how Dragon intends on bringing the device into the US, and put a stop to the plan.

Here's a laundry list of issues and observations I took from Dimension 5:

• I recently wrote about the lack of on-screen chemistry in Thor: The Dark World. If it's possible, Hunter and Nuyen have even less spark. On a scale of 1 - 10, I'd rate their on-screen chemistry at about a zero.

• The build-up to the big reveal that Power's new partner is a woman was painful to watch. I'm not sure how many times Power's boss said something like "your associate" or "your partner" without once using a pronoun. Maybe a female agent was surprising in 1966, but I found the whole exercise tedious.

• The time shift belt is featured in the first 10 minutes of the film and is all but forgotten until the final 10 minutes. There are plenty of other instances where the belt would have helped our heroes. And, at one point, we are treated to some rather lengthy scientific mumbo- jumbo about the dangers of getting stuck in a time shift. But I'm not sure why all this time is wasted on foreshadowing that goes nowhere. That movie, where the characters are caught in a different time arc, might have been more interesting.

• Why is Harold Sakata in this movie? You hire a big bruiser like Sakata and then put him in a wheelchair. What were they thinking? Also, what was the deal with Sakata's dubbing? The dubbing was horribly obvious. The sound quality was completely different from anything else in the film. However, I will give Dimension 5 some credit for hiring actual Asians like Sakata, Nuyen, and a host of others to play Asian parts. A lot of studios and producers would have hired non-Asians and (as I call it) "yellow-faced" the parts. I appreciate the effort.