War-Gods of the Deep (1965)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

WAR-GODS OF THE DEEP (CITY IN THE SEA) has one thing going for it: director Jacques Tourneur. Unfortunately, even one of the finest Fright Film makers to ever shiver me timbers can't overcome this script. There ARE a couple of shots near the beginning of the movie that promise more than the final film ever delivers: beautifully-composed shots of a darkened den that even COLOR can't ruin. And then there's the first assault of the "gill-men." They attack at night and are gone in an instant. This brief glimpse is so tantalizing that later scenes in which we see them fully exposed (and lit) are painfully disappointing (and by no means in keeping with Tourneur's lifelong assertion that "less is more" when it comes to Monsters on screen). I'd be interested in reading up on the making of this one, because the departure from his Standard Operating Procedure needs some explaining. Maybe McFarland Publishing has a book on the subject... (If not, perhaps FILMFAX has run an article about the making of...)

Jacques Tourneur began his career in his father Maurice's native France with moderately good comedies such as "Toto",reached his peak in the forties and the fifties with such classics as "cat people" "out of the past" "nightfall" or "curse of the demon".In the late fifties ,"Timbuktu" and" la battaglia di Maratona" a sword and sandal flick indicated a neat decline."The city under the sea" , inspired by Edgar Poe ,recalls Roger Corman's contemporary works (but does not cut them) while looking sometimes like a poor man's "journey to the center of the earth" :Herbert plays the role of the goose Gertrude in Levin's Verne adaptation.The screenplay is rather mediocre ,compared with Tourneur's previous works ,and many good ideas are not fully exploited (the picture of the woman or the time which stood still in the city under the sea).The settings are rather nice ,particularly the huge hand;on the other hand ,the "fishmen" are Mardi Gras and the battle between them and the humans is much too long.If you have never seen a Tourneur movie,you'd better choose something else.Take "cat people" "Berlin express" or "Curse of the demon" instead.

This is an oldie and it's never going to win any awards. Certainly not for plot, special effects or acting anyway.Take 2 Americans living in a remote Cornish Village by the sea, mix in some local legends & superstitions about a sunken city and smugglers, add the over the top acting of horror legend Vincent Price, David Tomlinson (better known for Bedknobs & Broomsticks) and John Le Measurer (better known for Dads Army) and you have "City Under The Sea".Price leads a group of former smugglers in an underwater city who raid the surface by night for all they can not salvage from the sea. On one of these raids a book is stolen containing a drawing of a women who looks just like Prices dead wife and he sends someone up to kidnap her, thinking his wife has returned from the grave.Obvious her American friend goes off to rescue her with Tomlinson in tow as the comic relief, playing an incompetent coward with a chicken called Herbert for company.Based on something written by Edgar Allen Poe (not the 1st time Price has done something by him either!) there clearly wasn't much to work on to create the basic framework of this movie.We have the underwater city, the inhabitants are all over 130 years old due to something in the air but this also renders them unable to go above the surface in the daylight as ultraviolet light will age and kill them.This eventually proves to be Prices fate after the American man & Tomlinson rescue the girl and escape to freedom. Generally weak film with a poor ending. A short cameo by Tony Selby (known for "Get Some In" & "Dr Who") is easily missed.Better left unwatched.

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!