Terror Beneath the Sea

Yes, you can finally toss away your old, crummy VHS copies of Terror Beneath the Sea (1966) as Dark Sky Films, in their infinite awesomosity, has provided an excellent looking DVD release of this rather obscure and offbeat film. It's worth mentioning up front this is the 73-minute U.S. version, and not the 90-minute Japanese version. Directed by Hajime Sato (House of Terrors, Body Snatcher from Hell), the film features Peggy Neal (The X from Outer Space), Erik Neilson, Franz Gruber (The X from Outer Space, The Last Days of Planet Earth), and Sonny Chiba, who had yet to garner the popularity soon to follow with his popular `Street Fighter' films released through the 1970s. Chiba, approaching 70 years of age, can still be seen kicking ash in recent releases like The Storm Riders (1998) and Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003).Ken (Chiba) and Jenny (Neal) are a pair of reporters, who seem more than just professionally involved, currently aboard a futuristic submarine, covering the navy's testing of a newly developed homing torpedo. After a spiel by a navy spokesman, who seemed to give away an awful lot of what I would consider classified information, the test begins, and everything goes well except for the brief appearance of an odd looking creature across the view port. Being good (nosy) reporters, Ken and Jenny take it upon themselves to do a little follow up investigating, diving near where they saw the anomaly, which happens to be near an underwater, atomic waste site (skin diving near radioactive toxic waste? Where do I sign up?). Eventually the pair gets separated, Jenny has a run in with a sea monkey man, snaps a photo, drops her camera, and, as a result, has no proof the event ever happened, so no one believes her except for Ken, and even he seems a bit skeptical. The plucky pair, returning to retrieve Jenny's camera, find an underwater cave, are captured by a small group of sea monkey men, and end up in a vast, underwater facility developed my a egomaniacal scientist type named Dr. Rufus Moore (Neilson), who has grandiose visions of a fabulous, futuristic, utopian society under the sea, one in which he's obviously in charge. As a means to an end, Dr. Moore has been turning poor schlubs into water cyborgs, altering not only their outer appearance, but their innards too, in an effort to create an army of computer controlled, sea monkey men to do his bidding (he can even make them fight like Rock `em Sock `em Robots). As the navy continues to search for the two, missing reporters, Ken formulates a plan to escape (one that involves throttling a woman and stealing her access card...you da man!), but Dr. Moore, being the rotten no-goodnik he is, has different plans for the couple, nefarious ones that involve turning them into mindless water cyberborgs (that might be an improvement for Jenny, especially if it puts a stop to her endless shrieking). Soon after the navy does find Moore's secret underwater base, there's some missile action, and the stuff hits the fan as navy rockets knock out the controls that keep the sea monkey men in check, causing them to not only turn on their masters, but anyone who doesn't sport gills, including Ken and Jenny...I enjoyed the hell out of this film, produced at Toei Studios, mainly because it was just so weird. It's sort of a strange hybrid between the spy films of the 1960s and a creature feature from the 1940s/1950s. The acting is lousy, even ridiculously so at times, but that ended up being part of the fun here, for me, at least. This movie is worth watching if only to see the scene featuring the main scientist working for Dr. Moore spouting off pompously and dramatically about all they've achieved, and their goals for the future. Another great scene occurs near the end, aboard the navy submarine, right after a sort of play by his own rules navy guy orders the firing of some super powerful, awesoma weapon called the X-4 ("Not the X-4 you'll blow up the whole ocean!"). After successfully nailing the intended target, the one navy guy says to the other, with an incredulous look of surprise on his face, "Wow! You've hit the jackpot!"...as for what follows, you have to see it for yourself, as I can't adequately describe it...one thing's for sure, Sonny Chiba and Peggy Neal have absolutely no chemistry whatsoever. Neal, who has the personality of a wet noodle, runs around for about a third of the film screeching, squealing, and shrieking, in no particular order, continually throwing her hands up in a defensive manner to avoid looking at whatever unpleasantness there is to see (turns out for the viewers, she was the `unpleasantness'), and just flogging the `damsel in distress' routine within an inch of its life. Her character is a useless piece of flotsam whose only purpose is to look good on the screen, and provide a sort of love interest for the hero...not that I mind that sort of thing, but one doesn't have to make it so obvious. As far as Sonny, it was kinda neat seeing him prior to his Street Fighter days, with his fashionable uni-brow coming in nicely. He does get in some decent fight sequences, but it's all kind of tame compared to some of his later movies. The sea monkey men looked funky, but I think maybe back in 1966, when the movie was released, they probably looked better, perhaps even scary. I thought the special effects were pretty cool, especially the sequence involving the transformation process of human to fish man, including a surgical process to install a new set of organs (none of which we actually get to see) for a more amphibious lifestyle. The miniature work was very strong, matching most anything coming out of Toho Studios at the time. The story moves along pretty well (if you don't mind a few, plodding scuba sequences up front), and then picks up a whole lot more after the fish men, who've been trained extensively of the use of automatic weapons and spear guns, turn on their human overlords once the computer controls are disabled, making use of their acquired talents to do a whole lot of killing. Woo hoo! All in all this is a silly movie, but a whole lot of 1960s swinging fun with some decent production values, a third rate James Bond villain, some scaly, hostile gill men, a young Sonny Chiba, dubious science fiction, some blood, and a really irritating blonde girl with a propensity for screaming unnecessarily.The picture quality on this Dark Sky Films DVD release, presented in widescreen (1.85:1) anamorphic, looks excellent, and the Dolby Digital 2.0 audio comes through beautifully. There's zippo, nada, zilch for extras, but there are English subtitles available.Cookieman108If I learned anything from this film its that sea monkey men are a hostile bunch, and wouldn't hesitate for a second to fire a spear into your guts...and if you're going to construct a vast, advanced, futuristic, undersea base, avoid doing so near an unstable navy atomic dumping site.

Back in the mid-70’s channel 19 in Cincinnati had this film in their weekend afternoon movie rotation. I got to see it a couple of times when I was about 7 and it absolutely scared the crap out of me. Perhaps my worst nightmare as a child was influenced by it. I had forgotten the name, but over the years kept my eye on TV listings and occasionally looked in movie books and later on the internet searching for what that old scary movie might have been, but was never able to find it. Then a couple of weeks ago I was watching “X from Outer Space” on TCM and hit IMDB to see what other films the lead actress had been in and WHAM the very first one was called “Terror Beneath the Sea” and had poster art of the horrible creature from my nightmare. I knew immediately that I had my film and went straight to Amazon to see if it was available. Now after 40 years I have relived the terrifying experience of my childhood.…and of course it isn’t terrifying at all to an adult, as I suspected, but much to my surprise it turned out to be a very entertaining piece of bad cinema. My only real memory had been the monsters and that evil people in an undersea lair were turning people into them. I took that seriously as a child, but the reality is that the movie is just a whole lot of absurd fun. The plot concerns a Bond-style supervillain bent on world conquest who has somehow secretly constructed a massive underwater base complete with missile defenses right off the coast of a nuclear power plant and right next to a giant underwater nuclear waste dump. (And as you can imagine the nuclear waste is highly unstable and explosive.) He plots world domination using an army of fish-people (they look like a bad take on the Creature from the Black Lagoon) that he’s created from real people through a crazy process involving swapping their guts! We see that on screen and it’s not nearly as gross as they could have made it, but is horrifying to a child. The lead actress spends much of the movie in distress and screaming. She’s pretty and reminds me of the girl I had a crush on in 1st grade. I’m sure I imagined myself the hero (played by Sonny Chiba in an early role) as he shoots his way across the base rescuing her. The whole thing climaxes with an undersea battle involving missiles, submarines and lots of explosions.No fan of old bad sci-fi films should miss this. Sets, costumes and effects are on par with other 1960’s Japanese monster flicks, which is to say not great but lovingly rendered. And every scene is overacted with corny dialog that’s all filmed in English but the audio doesn’t line up with mouth movements exactly, creating a dubbed effect anyway. The director had to know what he was doing which lends a somewhat inspired feel to the whole mess. It’s almost like it’s a parody of itself. It definitely has rewatch value. Seriously, this is one of the most entertaining bad movies I have ever seen. It’s so outlandish, so badly acted, so totally over the top that it excels as sheer entertainment. I can’t believe it’s fallen into obscurity.Svengoolie, take notice and put this in your rotation!

In that time Japanese film studios made B class sci-fi films with American actors in Japan. Peggy Neal was so popular actoless of these films. Even Chiba plaid many sci-fi films. You can not listen Chiba’ voice on this DVD, but you can listen all of American actor’s voice. In that time, they shot Japanese and English mixed in stage. Then they dubbed for Japanese and English separate.This film’s monster suits used some Toei TV shows like Akumakun and Captain Ultra. I had this film’s sketch book.Unfortunately, Sony Chiba didn’t believe in COVID-19 vaccine’s effect, then he didn’t have any vaccine shot.

This movie is super fun, I saw this flick at the drive in as a young man, I was with a group of friends from high school, we all laughed and commented on everything, as far as I know this was peggy neals only movie, she was pretty good looking then, a funny thing she still looks like that in my mind, sonny chiba is karate free in this movie, street fighter was still several years away at this time, if you watch the actors lips, the Caucasian actors are speaking English and the Asian actors are speaking Japanese, the acting is exaggerated and over the top, it really is entertaining, the bad guy wears sunglasses at all times even though they are 3000 feet deep in the ocean, the booger man transformation is in stop motion, it's cool, peggys reaction is priceless, this movie is a fantastic addition to my collection, I highly recommend, this copy is crisp, clear, especially in a blue ray player, the sound is clear and loud, you'll watch it over and over,

During a live television link showing off the Navy's new homing torpedo, nicknamed the 'Bloodhound' a strange silouette of a human(?)flashes across the screen. The Navy personnel shrug it off as a dead body(??!!). Two of the repoerters present at the time, Ken(Sonny Chiba) and Jenny(Peggy Neal) are unconvinced at this explanation, and go diving near where the tests took place, to try to uncover any clues to what happened. What they discover is an underwater city run by evil Dr Moore(Erik Neilsen) who is trying to create a huge underwater empire of human-fish hybrids to do his evil bidding. Will Barbie and Ken manage to defeat the underwater menace?This is a charming little film, aimed squarely at the kids. Its a sort of cross between Doctor Who, a 1930's chapter serial and various aquatic actioners such as 'City Beneath The Sea' and 'Warlords Of Atlantis'. It is in fact a Japanese film complete with over excited dubbing, where even a simple sentence such as "would you like your steak medium or rare" is turned into a statement full of great emotion and meaning by our over enthusiastic dubbers. It has a great eerie music score, which reminded me a lot of the music for Corman's 'The Haunted Palace', but the action on view is just undemanding matinee movie fare. Its very enjoyable though, and it makes a refreshing change to see a Japanese monster movie from the 1960's that doesnt rely on a climatic fight between two giant monsters as its punchline.Good fun, but nothing out of this world. Nice presentation of the DVD by Dark Sky as I've come to expect from this company. 3 out of 5

Journalists Ken & Jenny are diving when investigating the Navy's torpedo tests when they are captured by half man/fish creatures(actually called sea-cyborgs!) and taken to an underwater city ruled by campy 60's type James Bond villain Dr Moore-fun sci-fi underwater movie- perfect for a Saturday morning viewing- wait till you see how Dr Moore turns man into a seacyborg and you even get sea snow!

eeh