Kaitei daisensô

This is a fun adventure flick that conjures up feelings of nostalgic Japanese horror. It's not scary but will keep you in stitches during the viewing and long afterwards. This film would fit nicely into a "films so bad...they're good!" library. It's worth at least one viewing if only for the laughs and the special effects.......oh, they're great!

This is no CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, but I had extremely low expectations going in. The movie was a little better than I anticipated, but not by much.

The film concerns two journalists who realize there is something amiss going on in the waters off of Japan when they view an informational film done by the military and see something that they shouldn't. When they try to investigate, they unwillingly become part of a mad scientist's master plan to build and rule an underwater kingdom.

There are a variety of actors in TERROR BENEATH THE SEA, both Japanese and non-Japanese. Most of the film is dubbed which can always lend itself to overacting a bit - there is no exception here. I also found that the roles were somewhat one dimensional - the mad scientist was the stereotypical mad scientist (complete with dark sunglasses), the lead female was the stereotypical woman from the 60's (outside of having a job) who looked to her man to save her and whined and cried a lot, the military guys were as formal as you would expect, etc. The monsters were fairly well done for the time and not as bad as some others I've seen but their costumes were obviously cheaply made. Interestingly, throughout most of the film they are programmed to act in a certain way, but towards the end, they have a mind of their own.

The plot line is rather slow and the special effects were really saved for the end of the film. There are lots of underwater explosions that were actually pretty well done for the time although some other reviewers would disagree. The other effects were really chintzy though. The soundtrack was the typical "mod" type common in the 1960's.

This is really a movie for either kids or fans of old Japanese monster movies. I wouldn't be able to recommend it to a horror fan.

Ken and Jenny, a doctor and a reporter (Shin'ichi (Sonny) Chiba and Peggy Neal), stumble across the undersea lair of a megalomanic and his army of surgically-modified amphibious cyborgs with which he plans to conquer the world. This juvenile offering from Toei Studios features a mostly Western cast alongside action-hero Chiba (chop-socky fans will be disappointed at the dearth of athletic fights) with a near amateur performance by Neal (to be fair, she has little to work with and spends most of her screen time trying to look horrified). The film contains some reasonably well done underwater miniature work but the centerpiece, the scaly cyborgs are laughable when seen clearly, especially when their costumes are torn. The gilled minions are controlled by the chortling villain through a control box with apparently three settings (off, work, and fight) and are ostensibly brainless (or so we are told) yet seem to know how to effectively use guns. There is an entertaining (if not very convincing) transition scene in which nefarious Doctor Heim (Mike Daneen) creates a cyborg (courtesy of a lot of squishy stop-motion shots intercut with numerous close-ups of Jenny looking increasingly horrified). A later transformation scene involving the heroes leaves the two leads running around with what appears to be pieces of latex stuck to their chins (much to Jenny's horror). There a couple of action sequences involving the undersea-base's defenses vs. An attacking submarine (apparently armed with the X4, a weapon that could "blow up the whole ocean") leading to a finale that includes all of the expected climactic tropes. The film suffers from some editing problems (the scenes in which the heroes are to be transformed seem to be out of sequence or partially deleted) and the overall production including the sound, music, and cinematography, is substandard even for a low-budget Japanese techno-adventure targeting a young audience. I have a fondness for (and a high tolerance of) Japanese science fiction films but 'Terror Beneath the Sea' is pretty awful, even when compared to Toho's dreadful 'Latitude Zero' (1970) or Peggy Neal's other tokusatsu outing, the extremely goofy but entertaining 'The X from Outer Space' (1967).

Sadly, before Sonny Chiba made the wonderful martial arts films that made him so famous throughout the world, he starred in a bazillion films--including some real turkeys like INVASION OF THE NEPTUNE MEN (in the bottom 100 films on IMDb). Despite a fairly respectable current score of 5.5 on IMDb, TERROR BENEATH THE SEA is also one of these early bad films. Now it isn't nearly as terrible as INVASION OF THE NEPTUNE MEN (but what is?!), it's still mighty bad and a film only for kids and the curious.

The film involves Chiba and a cast of Westerners and Japanese investigating some strange creatures in the ocean. They look like a poor man's version of the Creature from CREATURE OF THE BLACK LAGOON--rubber body suits painted silver with putty-like faces. It turns out that they are the creation of a mad megalomaniac (Dr. Moore) who has learned to change humans into practically anything he'd like. Using a mind control device, these cheesy monsters do his bidding. And where does this crazed genius live? Yep, 3000 feet under the ocean--and it's up to Chiba and the US Navy to stop this crazy and his freaky friends. They never really explain how the subs are able to go that deep and Chiba's stupid red-headed sidekick wants to swim from there to the surface (they'd be crushed like grapes by the pressure almost immediately). Maybe originally they mean 300 feet and it was mis-dubbed!

The film looks very Japanese when it comes to the underwater battles and sub. There are lots of fires and explosions(!) under water and much of it looks really, really cheap--like they were created by someone who built the cities for the Godzilla films. Oddly, despite these silly special effects, some of the underwater diving scenes were very well done and filmed well and the color throughout the film was lovely--very vivid and clean. The costumes also aren't bad (other than the silver-suited freaks).

The film is entertaining silliness that bad movie fans and kids will like, but I can't imagine anyone else sitting through this odd film. Well,...at least it IS different!

I like the simplicity of it. You couldn't intentionally make a movie like this; it's just some kind of magic that falls into place, but the audience has to go along with this kind of accidental wackiness or it will fail to entertain.