SpecialsTarget Disturbing yet enthralling

Majorthebys Charming and brutal

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Cissy Évelyne It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

bkoganbing Most of the time when a film is held up in release you know the studio has lost faith in it. Made in 1963 according to the Citadel film series book on Vincent Price the film did not come out until 1965.It wasn't a terrible film, but it was exceedingly dull in spots and exceedingly stupid in one aspect. Of course anything with Vincent Price being sinister will have some good points.Set in Cornwall at the turn of the last century, the City Beneath The Sea is about a local legend of a lost city off the coast that became lost during an earthquake. Some might call it Atlantis, but the locals use the Arthurian legend name of Lyonness.Young heiress Susan Hart disappears and her lawyer and a visiting artist find a secret passage from her home. Tab Hunter and David Tomlinson play the pair of hunters respectively.Folks originally lived there adapted and became water breathing gill men. How later arriving humans like Vincent Price and his pirate crew subjugate them is never explained and is beyond me. But one thing does happen these folks live very long like the inhabitants of Shangri- La. And they have the same weakness that those Shangri-La characters do.In a much better film, Journey To The Center Of The Earth one of the characters carried his pet goose until the villain ate him. I thought that was a stupid plot gambit then and I think David Tomlinson carrying the pet rooster Herbert was even more ridiculous. After a while his silly twit Englishman got downright annoying.Vincent Price's fans might show a little strain with this one.

Woodyanders 1903: The Cornish coast. Dashing mining engineer Ben Harris (likable Tab Hunter) and jolly artist Harold Tufnell-Jones (an amusing David Tomlinson) discover a crumbling underwater society ruled by the ruthless Sir Hugh (the always terrific Vincent Price) while poking around a cave in search of sweet fair damsel Jill Tregillis (fetching Susan Hart). The former smuggler inhabitants never age and exploit gill-men creatures as slave labor. Moreover, there's an active volcano which threatens to erupt at any moment. Director Jacques Touneur, working from a fanciful and eventful script by Charles Bennett and Louis M. Heyward that's loosely based on an Edgar Allan Poe poem, relates the engrossing story at a steady pace, evokes a pleasingly eerie and mysterious atmosphere in the opening third, elicits sound acting from a game cast, and stages the lively and exciting last twenty-five minutes depicting the inevitable climactic eruption of the volcano and our protagonists being chased underwater by Sir Hugh and his flunkies with considerable brio. Moreover, there's a nice sense of imagination evident throughout, the amphibious seaweed-covered humanoid fishmen are pretty gnarly looking, the sets are fairly lavish, and the special effects might be crude by today's more sophisticated standards, but still possess a certain funky charm just the same. Stephen Dade's sumptuous widescreen cinematography gives the picture an impressively expansive and picturesque look. Stanley Black's moody and robust score likewise hits the bull's eye. A fun flick.

Cosmoeticadotcom War-Gods Of The Deep is one of those films whose title really makes no sense, but is right in keeping with the whole tenor of the film. It was made in 1965, the first of the famed American International Pictures post-Roger Corman Edgar Allan Poe-themed horror and sci fi films of the 1960s, that started with The House Of Usher in 1960, and was a part of the Big Four of horror and sci fi films of that era. The three other competitors in the field were the giant monster films from Japan (Godzilla, Mothra, Gammera, etc.), the stop motion action-adventure-monster films of Ray Harryhausen, and the British Hammer Studios horror films. That War-Gods Of The Deep was set in England, even though made by AIP, and featuring two American B film superstars like Vincent Price and Tab Hunter, and based upon a poem by American poet and writer Poe, is just one of its many ironies. Yet, that still does not explain its odd title. The alternate title was The City Under The Sea, which makes sense, since that's what it is about, a city reputedly called Lyonesse- not any War-Gods. It was based upon the Poe poem The City In The Sea, which is quoted by Price at film's start and end, and begins:Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone Far down within the dim West, Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest.Suffice to say, the poem was not one of Poe's great classics, and the film derived from it is not one of AIP's better Poe themed films. War-Gods Of The Deep was the final film in the storied career of Jacques Tourneur, probably the greatest B film director in cinema history, and one of the true masters of the black and white medium. While better known for his classic films produced by Val Lewton (Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie), Tourneur proved he could make great horror films on his own. In 1957 he directed the British horror classic Night Of The Demon (Curse Of The Demon in the U.S.), and even in this color film, with its thin premise of a sunken city off the Cornish coast, unaging sailors from the Eighteenth Century, who do not age because of an imbalance of oxygen from an undersea volcano and some nonsense about ultraviolet light on the earth's surface in daylight (huh?), Gill-Men who are third rate Creatures From The Black Lagoon, and other assorted lunacy- such as a British comic foil for Hunter who carries about a chicken with the male name of Herbert, the film actually entertains, even if it lacks real chills.The film has several layers to it. Watching it today, one must bear in mind, with the film over four decades old, yet the story is set in the more distant past of 1903, with characters who came from their even more distant past of decades, and even over a century, earlier, that this was made right at the beginning of notions of Postmodernism; which shows mostly that PoMo and B film psychology are kissin' cousins. What this says for both mindsets and pulling the wool over one's eyes is open for debate. The film also makes great use of its recycled AIP wares from prior movies. AIP reputedly never trashed old sets, and art director Frank White makes the most of the sets and miniatures that comprise the underwater city. The film also seems to be a scrapbook of ideas from other, better films, like the aforementioned Poe films, and The Time Machine. But, it also recalls the stellar Forbidden Planet by having the underground city being powered by huge pumps and machinery built by a long destroyed society that is no longer, having degenerated into the Gill-Men. The underwater cinematography by Neil Ginger Gemmell and John Lamb is also excellent, for a B film, even though the divers are all manifestly in a pool no more than fifteen or twenty feet deep, not leagues under the sea for the surface can be seen a few feet above the divers' heads. There are even some chuckles to be had when Harold sticks his chicken Herbert inside his diving helmet. The rest of the cinematography, by Stephen Dade, is merely solid, although there are some moody moments captured seemingly inadvertently, with miniatures.

ferbs54 Back in 1803, Vincent Price and his band of smugglers had discovered an undersea kingdom off the English coast. In 1903, they are still down there, ageless, and lording it over the resident "gillmen." Price then kidnaps a woman from above who resembles his long-dead wife, which leads Tab Hunter and his pet-rooster-obsessed artist sidekick to come looking for her... Anyway, that's the setup of what turns out to be a rather hokey affair. A tiresome and cheesy movie, featuring only-adequate FX and some very lame comedy, "War-Gods of the Deep" (1965) is something of a labor to sit through. Part of the problem is that events and backgrounds are never adequately explained, and what explanations we do get (e.g., the inhabitants' immortality) are patently ridiculous. The layout of the underwater kingdom is impossible to grasp, a real problem toward the film's end. And the three-way underwater battle between Hunter's band, Price and his crew, and the gillmen is also impossible to follow; possibly the dullest, most confusing underwater sequence I've ever witnessed. Compare this scene to the thrilling and quite lucid underwater duke-out in that same year's "Thunderball." Geez! It's hard to believe that director Jacques Tourneur is the same man who gave us such horror classics as "I Walked With a Zombie," "Cat People" and "Curse of the Demon." What WAS he thinking here? Anyway, this mess is for Uncle Vinny completists only. It's better than a Dr. Goldfoot movie, but not by much!