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For once a British actor plays the lead in a cheap Hollywood movie rather than vice versa (playing a Yank, John Bentley's dodgy accent covered by a c.v. including time spent studying at Oxford).

Set in the Pacific in 1944, with the aid of a heroic score by Alexander Laszlo and slickly cut so that the interiors shot by veteran cameraman Gilbert Warrenton well match the library footage (some of it pretty ancient looking) it competently works it's way through the usual friction between the officers followed by enemy mines and a Gung Ho finale; capped by a surprising appearance by the statuesque Marilyn Hanold, soon to shed her uniform as June 1959's Playmate of the Month and later usually cast as bad girls.

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.

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.

You've seen this movie before, done by everybody from Cary Grant ("Destination Tokyo") to Clark Gable ("Run Silent Run Deep") to Glenn Ford ("Torpedo Run"), and done better in pretty much every case.

This is a cast of nobody-you-ever-heard-of (for good reasons; I hope they didn't quit their day jobs) in a stock WWII plot about a sub on a secret mission. The acting is atrocious, the characters are incredibly clichéd (especially annoying: the short enlisted "comic relief" Jerry Lewis clone), and there are plot holes big enough to drive a submarine through.

If that were all it had, I'd give "Submarine Seahawk" maybe 2 stars, as an almost complete waste of film. However, this movie is saved from the scrap pile by better than average effects (some borrowed from other films), particularly in the climactic scene of the air assault on the Japanese flotilla. It's the explosions, fires, and splashes that usually give the model work in naval movies that shot-in-the-bathtub look. But especially considering how long ago this movie was made (and its obviously meager budget) those visuals were very nicely done. If for no other reason (and I sure can't think of any) this movie is worth watching for the impressive effects in that scene.

What's the best way to see "Submarine Seahawk"? Do as I did the first time I saw it, and miss the first hour or so. (I only wish I had missed that part again on my second viewing.) 9 stars for the attack scene, 2 for the rest of the movie.

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.