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 Hilariously dated: Chinese society called Dragon threatens to blow up Los Angeles unless all American forces are withdrawn from Southern Asia.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".

KTLA, in Los Angeles, used to excavate this moldy bit of time-travel weirdness, fairly often. I got interested from the cast, uniting Jeffrey Hunter, (at about the same time he would have been filming the original "Star Trek" pilot, "The Cage"), with future "Star Trek" guest, France Nuyen, ("Elaan Of Troyas"). The SF is very low-budget, very typical of its time, but still manages some interesting comments on time-travel, and its ramifications. (similar in some ways to a classic bit of SF, also pretty forgotten nowadays, "Cyborg 2087"). The time-travel belt is astoundingly cheap, yet every kid I knew wanted one! (ah, the old days before marketing took over!) Hunter gives this more than it probably deserved, and his performance brings most of the worth to the proceedings, while Nuyen tries to look Chinese, (and Communist!). The production was obviously quite cheap, and I have my doubts this ever played theatres. Saw it for years on Independent TV stations around the country, but it's pretty rare anymore. Skiffy ran it once or twice (I think), back when they survived on old movies, and never since they got "respectable", yet it's really no worse than much of their low-budget offerings. It's good cheese, and I wish it would poke its head out now and then.

Dumped Along-Side Piles of Low-Budget James Bond Trash.

This Embarrassing Miss-Fire with Jeffrey Hunter as a Blue-Eyed Lady's Man is Juvenile Junk that Meanders Along with Hardly a Scene that isn't Worth-Less.

Hunter as Justin Powers Super-Spy, Complete with a Time-Travel Belt that Looks like it Came From the Toy-Section at K-Mart.

The Snazzy Adornment with its Multi-Colored Dials is a Cumbersome Gadget that also Comes with a "Ring" Accessory.

None of this Means Much Because it is Underused and Unimpressive when it is Used.

There are a Myriad of Jet Airliners Taking Off and Landing and Helicopters Hovering Here and There.

A Couple of Fight Scenes are as Boring and Dull as Possible in a Film that Struggles Consistently to be Anything More than an Episode of a Mediocre TV Show.

There are Bond,eh, Powers-Babes Sprinkled Around Winking, Fawning, and Pitching-Woo, because that's a Trope of the Genre.

Beefcake and Oiled-Up Harold "Odd-Job" Sakata Shows Up as, get this, "Big Buddha", but for Some Reason is Confined to a Wheel-Chair.

Abysmal, Atrocious, and Skippable this is 1 Bond Knock-Off that is a Complete and Utter Fizzle.

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.

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.