A fancy new atomic submarine on its first mission in the Arctic Circle is buffeted by giant blocks of sinking ice. Though nobody seems particularly concerned about the fact that ice suddenly has a greater density than water, the sub surfaces anyway to see what’s going on. What they discover is that the entire sky is on fire -- apparently something to do with the gases in the Van Allen Belt igniting and bathing the Earth in deadly radiation that has already raised surface temperatures to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. (Presumably all this happened while the sub was submerged.) Two scientists aboard the sub -- one of them the admiral that designed the boat -- quickly calculate a solution to the problem: shoot a nuclear missile into the Van Allen Belt that will cause the energy to disperse harmlessly outward. (If you don’t quite follow how any of this could be remotely possible, I’m sure a science professional would be happy to explain it to you.)
The sub makes full steam for the United Nations in New York City, where the scientists plan to present their solution. However, they find that the U.N.’s scientific advisors have already decided on a bold “well, let’s just see what happens” course of action, believing that the Van Allen Belts will burn themselves out when surface temperatures on the Earth reach a mild and balmy 170 degrees Fahrenheit. (So why worry?) Not happy with this, the scientist/admiral commandeers the atomic sub, intending to launch the missile anyway. For reasons so stupid that the movie doesn’t even try to explain them, the missile must be launched from a specific point in the Pacific Ocean at a specific hour on a specific day. To save the world, the sub must make that rendezvous -- but first it must survive a bevy of underwater perils and the combined forces of the world’s navies (i.e., one other sub) trying to stop them.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
Golly goodness, no. VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA was produced and directed by “master of disaster” Irwin Allen, who would later be responsible for movies like THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and THE TOWERING INFERNO. But whatever you may think about his disaster flicks (personally I like them), he is clearly not a man who cares much about science fiction. Everything about this movie is either stupid, boring, cheap, or some combination of the three. But it is a pretty good case study of a certain kind of overblown sci-fi epics that would be infuriating if they weren’t so dumb.
As in his later disaster movies, Irwin Allen pulls together a motley crew of recognizable but mostly second-string actors to fill his sub, including Walter Pidgeon, Barbara Eden, Joan Fontaine, Michale Ansara, Frankie Avalon, and Peter Lorre (in full-on slumming mode). Yet despite the medium wattage star power of the cast, none of the characters are particularly interesting. The conflict between the monomaniacal admiral and the sub’s more humane captain is meant to be a tense human drama running parallel to the end-of-the-world plot. But nobody is going to mistake VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA for THE CAINE MUTINY (or even THE GHOST SHIP) anytime soon. It’s pretty indicative of the movie’s leaden handling of its characters that it requires not one, not two, but THREE different saboteurs (all with different motives, mind you) onboard to wring the tiny bit of drama from the crew dynamics that it gets.
Effective -- or even merely enthusiastic -- special effects cover a multitude of sins in dull sci-fi flicks, but VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA falls flat on its face in this department too. Irwin Allen was a notorious cost-cutter, and it shows. One anecdote about the 1960 re-make of THE LOST WORLD has it that Willis O’Brien was slated to do stop-motion effects, just as he had in the 1925 original. But to save money, Irwin Allen instead decided to glue plastic horns onto lizards and pretend that they looked like dinosaurs instead. VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA is rarely as bad as that, but it does include the world’s most boring fight with a giant squid -- boring because its tentacles apparently only move when its victims kindly offer to thrash them about. Besides the squid, the crew also survives dull encounters with the sinking ice blocks mentioned above, an onboard fire, a couple of sharks, a giant octopus (that’s right: this movie has a giant squid AND a giant octopus), and a hostile submarine. One sequence with a field of undersea mines actually seems like it might turn out to be suspenseful or exciting, but fortunately it comes to a quick conclusion before anything really interesting can happen.
The most disappointing thing about VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA is that it clearly isn’t the product of an incompetent, exuberant madman like Ed Wood -- instead, it’s the product of competent professionals who just don’t seem to care that much. The film makers didn’t care about writing a plausible sci-fi story, or about depicting any actual undersea dangers or wonders, or about creating interesting characters, or even about showing whiz-bang special effects. The only hints of personality come from the cheesy theme song performed by Frankie Avalon, and during a short scene where Barbara Eden dances spastically to his searing hot trumpeting. But otherwise it’s just a lot of people blandly going through the motions of a forgettable sci-fi pseudo-epic.
What else happened this year?
-- Though not nearly as stupid as VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen’s THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND is one of the less interesting epic adventures those two collaborated on. Still, it features a great fight with a giant crab.
-- The world was introduced to another one of Godzilla’s many future foes in MOTHRA. (This one is a giant moth.)
-- Fred MacMurray starred as THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR in the first of Disney’s sci-fi comedies about the bouncy substance known as flubber.
-- And fans of goofy (but imaginative) B-movies should find many things to enjoy in THE PHANTOM PLANET.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1961...
It’s been many years since I’ve seen it, but I remember MOTHRA being one of the best Japanese giant monster movies.
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