by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Phantom
from 10,000 Leagues (I suppose the use of a
five-digit number and the word “leagues” as a measurement of distance was
supposed to evoke comparison to a far more prestigious property, Jules Verne’s 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea, which
had just had a major-budget film adaptation from Disney in 1954, one year
before Phantom was made), an early
project from American Releasing, the plucky little studio that saved the “B”
movie when the rest of Hollywood thought TV, antitrust and the demise of the
studio system had killed it. American Releasing quickly became American
International Pictures and, though they were so cheap they didn’t even have a
studio of their own (at the time they usually shot at Henry Ziv’s TV production
lot), they did have a repertoire of
familiar sets they recycled again and again: here the mad scientist’s home was
reused in It Conquered the World and the knotty-pine office was later far more famous as the mad
psychiatrist’s office in I Was a Teenage Werewolf. As just about anybody could guess from the title,
the movie was about a sea monster; the conceit in the script, written by Louis
Rusoff from an “original” story (quotes definitely intended!) by Dorys Luthaker, is that a glowing
radioactive deposit on the sea bottom off the coast has mutated normal marine
life into a radioactive monster — actually a human in a very tacky monster suit. The film was produced by the
Milner brothers — producer (and editor!) Jack and director Dan — and Dan Milner
and Rusoff introduce the monster in the very first (pre-credits) sequence: no
making you wait around for reams of boring exposition and several reels of
suspense over whether the monster really exists for these guys! Unfortunately, the monster suit is so risible the film gets off on the wrong note
immediately, more comedy than horror, and though Dan Milner actually attempts
some atmospherics, they just slow the film down. What really drags this one towards the depths (figuratively and literally) is the sheer weight of the script, its
attempt to crowd into one 80-minute long film (about 15 minutes too long for
its own good) just about all the tropes American International would later rely
on. There aren’t any rock musicians or surfers in it (despite the beach
location), and the only young lovers we see are a man and woman who go out to
skin-dive together and end up monster food.
But just about everything else we’d
expect to see in an American International film does turn up: a world-famous oceanographer, Dr. Ted
Stevens (Kent Taylor, who’d played Boston Blackie in that interesting TV show
that only lasted two seasons, and whose demise had the regrettable effect of
leaving him so desperate for employment that he took this part), a.k.a. “Ted
Baxter” (an alias whose purpose is never explained in the script, though
coincidentally it’s also the name of the anchorman on The Mary Tyler Moore
Show); Prof. King (Michael
Whalen), a crazy scientist who, it turns out, deliberately put that chunk of radioactive material on the
ocean floor to see if he could do a full-scale test of Stevens’ published
theory that the right sort of radioactive material could produce a death ray;
King’s nubile daughter Lois (Cathy Downs), who’s there to provide a love
interest for Stevens even though he’s there to prove her dad is a mass murderer
via the monsters (“monster,” singular, might be more appropriate since he only
creates one) he’s made with his radioactive deposit on the ocean floor; a
mystery man named George Thomas (Philip Pine) who lurks in the shadows and threatens
the other characters with a harpoon gun; Prof. King’s homely secretary, Ethel
Hall (Vivi Janiss), who judging from what we see is by far the smartest person
in the movie until she gets herself offed by George Thomas and his harpoon gun
(in the usual airy disregard for physical possibility in movies like this, he
shoots her in the back but, when she dies, the spear from the harpoon gun is
sticking in her front — but
then we’re supposed to believe Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy with
a shot from behind even though Kennedy’s head jerked violently backward when the kill shot hit, indicating it was fired
from in front of him); William “Bill” Grant (Rodney Bell), the officious
federal agent who’s investigating the mysterious deaths of divers in the area;
and Wanda (Helene Stanton), George Thomas’s blonde-bimbo girlfriend who’s
helping him steal the secret of the radioactive monsters so they can sell it to
a foreign power via a contact in Antwerp. “You mean she’s a Dutch spy?” Charles joked — to which I replied, “No, the
Dutch are just go-betweens. It’s the government of Mauritius that’s the real
purchaser!”
It also doesn’t help that the same shot of a rowboat is used every time someone goes
out to the part of the ocean where the sea monster is and turns him- or herself
into monster food (though the monster costume doesn’t have a mouth or claws on
its arms and it’s hard to believe this pathetically weak little thing in a
trick-or-treat costume could kill anyone), and topped off with the same shot of
the rowboat overturned on the beach after its human contents have met their
maker at the monster’s hands (or whatever those weird gloves are supposed to
represent). It also doesn’t
help that one of those stock sequences of a derelict ship being used by the
U.S. Navy for target practice and deliberately blown up is used to represent
the radioactive deposit Prof. King dropped on the ocean floor going critical
and blowing itself up (represented by another stock sequence, this time of a mushroom cloud), or
that Dan Milner’s and Lou Rusoff’s attempts to bring Social Significance to the
material just end up making the movie longer and duller. But as Charles pointed
out afterwards, American International saved the “B” movie by aiming their
product at drive-ins and the teen audiences they attracted, who were often more
interested in necking than they were in watching the movie — so for a film like
this, its quality (or lack of same) was really beside the point!
