Latitude Zero Film Review

This film from Ishiro Honda and Toho has two versions out there. One in Japanese and one in English. I naturally watched the one in Japanese with English sub-titles. As it turned out, that was probably the wrong choice. Five of the main actors are English speakers and the film was actually shot in English and later dubbed into Japanese for that market. This is pure crazy imaginative drug inducing fantasy. It feels like a sci-fi serial from the 1930s - Buck Rogers or The Undersea Kingdom - with underwater cities, advanced technology, dastardly villains, modernistic architecture and fashions and beautiful blondes in revealing tops. Ok, maybe that last bit only applies to this film. Throw in a little Doctor Moreau and Captain Nemo as well. Honda who was a strong believer in world peace also included one of the most humanistic and utopian messages of his films. The many special effects are produced as usual by Eiji Tsuburaya and the submarine models, torpedo's and volcanic explosions are cool, but the men in the animal suits needed more work. They were Wizard of Oz level.

Three men (Akira Takarada, Masumi Okada (as a Frenchman) and Richard Jaeckel as a reporter) are sent down into the deep to study currents in a Bathosphere. Jaeckel had been in The Green Slime the year before. A volcanic explosion breaks the machine loose from the ship above and it seems lost. But miraculously they wake up on the Alpha. A submarine. Captained by McKenzie (Joseph Cotten). And his only crew is a strong Japanese man (Kin Omae) and the doctor with the low cut top (Linda Haynes). The men learn that the sub was launched over 150 years previously and that McKenzie is over 200 years old. And if that isn't enough, he and others have created a utopia in which there are no wants in an underwater city called Latitude Zero.

Of course, there has to be a villain. In this case it is The Joker aka Dr. Malic aka Cesar Romero. He plays his villainy to the top; eyes ablaze, a cackling laugh, a sadistic sneer. He must have been loving this. He is great fun (even in Japanese). And totally evil. He has created giant animals with human brains implanted. Huge rats. A Griffin. His equally evil lover is played by Patricia Medina, a fine actress in the 40s and 50s. Malic has been trying to kill McKenzie since they were students together. He sends a killer sub captained by the vicious female Captain Kuroiga (Hikaru Kuroki) to destroy them. With all sorts of defensive weapons they escape and make it to Latitude Zero. A scientist and his daughter allied with Latitude Zero are kidnaped and are being held in Malic's lair and he has plans for them. Of the animal kind. McKenzie and his crew have to go in and get him.

It is all quite cool; but the Japanese actors really get put in the background and Cotten and Romero dominate. Poor Jaeckel gets to play the obnoxious American who fills his bag with diamonds. It feels like an odd direction to go for Toho, but they were always looking for Western financing or access to Western markets. There is never any explanation as to how the city came to be or how they live so long. But definitely a nice place to live. The film is truly cheesy on every level, but quite entertaining for the child in all of us.