The Amazing Captain Nemo (1978)

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This is sort of a "1930s Serial as done by Irwin Allen". Imagine what Republic or Mascot could have done with 1970s movie technology. Superb special effects, the acting ranges from good to hammy, the dialog often inane, the premise preposterous, but if you don't take it too seriously, it's fun, a good rainy/snowy afternoon entertainment. It does contain one of my favorite movie scenes however. When the two Navy officers awaken Captain Nemo and he starts to talk about his crew and his ship, one of them says: "But Captain Nemo was a character in a book by Jules Verne!" To which he replies: "Had it perhaps occurred to you that that writer was a biographer as well as a novelist?"

This has to rate as one of the cheesiest of TV shows in a long time.Jose Ferrer played the title character, Nemo. He did the part justice and certainly looked the part. But nowadays, it strikes me that the Nemo he was made up to be bore more than a passing resemblance to Captain Bird's Eye, from the TV commercials. Or maybe it's the other way around.His nemesis, Professor Cunningham, was overacted brilliantly by Burgess Meredith. He never seemed to get over his "Penguin" days from Batman. Although he doesn't do his Penguin "quack" here, he is without parallel as the maniacal Professor. Only John Colicos, of Battlestar Galactica fame, chewed up the scenery better as a maniacal despot.I never can recall what the grudge was between Nemo and Cunningham, but it must have been severe, since the Prof. never missed a chance to try and scupper Nemo, and vice-versa.The effects were nothing special, though Prof. Cunningham's submarine was way better looking than Nemo's. It also had a crew of strange, fish-like amphibians that served Cunningham and did his every bidding.However, the most memorable aspect of the whole show was Prof. Cunningham's secret weapon. The Delta Beam! He was forever saying "Fire Delta Beam!", whereupon, a fishy crewman would horribly overract the motion of firing the weapon by use of a full shoulder shrug. Truly priceless! They don't make them like this anymore, and perhaps just as well. But like other series of this era, for those who remember it, it will always have an affectionate, if cheddar-covered, place in our hearts.

The Amazing Captain Nemo is a movie not worth searching out, but definitely worth watching if it's on TV late at night, when you don't take everything that is shown very seriously anymore. The movie has a deliciously nonsensical story about 2 Navy-commando's who accidentally find Captain Nemo and free him from stasis. After a 100 years, the Nautilus is still light years ahead of other submarines in terms of technology. When a mad scientist threatens the world in exchange for a ransom, Captain Nemo's help gets asked, even though he really wants to continue his search for Atlantis.The movie is full of over-wrought cheesy dialogue, over-acting, and unbelievable technology, but that's really the movie's charm. The mad scientist's dialogue could be used, line-for-line, as samples in techno-songs; that's how campy it is. Jose Ferrer is really the right man for the role. Although I know him more for his serious roles in secret intelligence movies, he plays the role of the larger-than-life Nemo fantastically. A fun movie to watch on a bored Friday night.

A very fun bad movie. Jose Ferrer (who played Emporer Shaddam IV in the fake video version of Dune) was the only good actor in this film. I saw this for the first time on TV in the late eighties in Woburn MA. I love submarine shows, fact and fiction, and my friends and I were heckling bad movies long before MST3K did it professionally. Professor Cunningham is the world's most senile supervillain. Tor the xenophobic psychic android was hilarious with his "Aliens must die!" lines. I swear that Cunningham's sub the Raven looked like it was made from Space:1999 Eagle parts. When Mr. Miller said that,"The U.S. government is not a commercial enterprise" I howled with laughter. Also laughed when Miller held up a Betamax videotape (another case of superior marketing [VHS] beating out superior technology [Beta], like Microsoft's brilliant marketing of crappy software, or the soap opera-like addictiveness of the WWE). Nemo's submarine the Nautilus was an incredible anachronism, psychedelic nuclear fission reactor, stealth projector, laser cannon, force field, 120 knots top speed (I believe our fastest subs today go almost 40 knots), and a crush depth deeper than anything other than the Bathyscape Trieste (which reached the deepest part of the oceans in 1960 with 2 crewmen aboard). Good guys fired blue stun lasers while bad guys fired red kill shots. Tor had the best handgun, 5 settings, stun, kill, 'freeze', 'thaw', force field. They even slowed down some Star Wars music for a corridor fight scene! The Atlantean King's two top advisors set off my gaydar. Apparently the formula for Nemo's laser beam is only about 10 characters long, according to Cunningham's brain tap, like wow man. I give this a 10 as a bad movie!