User Reviews

And that's a big but. This film comes from a special time period where fantasy and sci-fi was a grande affair, and unnecessarily sanctimonious. As one review pointed out the sets in the mansion and the underground caves were pleasing. Susan Hart was a passable heroine and Vincent Price reached into his bag of villain tricks and produced another version of his Master of the World persona. I could watch him in a cold tablet commercial. He's always the best.

Having said all of that, it's the type of movie you put on a Sunday afternoon while you're folding your socks and towels and briefs and making dinner. Though I'd never seen it before just hearing it the background for an hour and a half as I puttered around I could follow the story.

Tab Hunter was interesting here. Very different approach to this role than others I've seen. With a better director this movie and Hunter could have really made a B-grade classic. As it is, this is a pleasant glimpse into those old sci-fi flicks where a bunch of men sit around sipping Brandy in a study with walnut paneling in a rocket heading for the moon.

Rent it on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

After seeing "City Beneath the Sea", I can understand why this is among the lesser-known films Vincent Price made during the 1960s. The problem is that although the idea for the story is pretty cool and it's filmed in color, there really isn't much energy in the film and it never manages to rise above mediocrity. It's a real shame, as I was anxious to enjoy this film.

The film is set near the beginning of the 20th century in Britain. Oddly, despite the British location, three of the four leads in the film are Americans--something they never really explained very well. Following a spate of odd occurrences and a dead body washed ashore, a woman (Susan Hart) is kidnapped by some sea creature. Tab Hunter and David Tomlinson set off to find her--begging the viewer to wonder if perhaps they could have found a more formidable search party had they just looked a bit further! Eventually, their search takes them to a swirling pool of water in a cave. The pair accidentally fall in and are sucked into an undersea city where Vincent Price rules with an iron hand. This might no be so bad if it weren't for the fact that Price seemed pretty irrational and blood-thirsty. Plus they discover the lady who'd been spirited away--it turns out she looked like some old lady that Price was in love with so he ordered his goofy sea monster friends to kidnap her.

There are two huge problems in this underground paradise. First, there is increasing seismic activity that appears ready to destroy the city. Second, Price is so irrational that there is no way they'll die from the underwater volcano--Price is sure to have them killed sooner. So, Hunter, Tomlinson and Hart escape using primitive looking diving outfits. Naturally, Price, his henchmen and the sea monsters all give chase. Will the trio survive or be doomed to nutty old Price's mercy? This basic story isn't bad. The problem is that there is just not much energy in the film despite the story idea and a few nice special effects and underwater cinematography. In addition, Tomlinson was simply dreadful in the film, as his character was annoying, impossible to believe and a bit of an idiot. How anyone could be expected to rely on him is beyond me! Plus, I rather hoped that he would die--he was just not particularly good as a character. As for Price, his character's motivations seemed vague. He was bad and mad...but why?! In his films such as the Dr. Phibes films or "Theater of Blood", you clearly understood what made him tick and why he HAD to kill. Here he just seems like a jerk...and rarely is that sufficient motivation for a film. Overall, it's worth watching if you have nothing pressing to do or if you MUST see every film Price made.

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.

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.

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.