So is the other film shown at the Vintage Sci-Fi screening last night, Dimension 5. This time the star on his way down United Pictures and their co-producers hired was Jeffrey Hunter, who’s best known for his role as Jesus Christ in the 1961 version of King of Kings and for having played Captain Christopher Pike in “The Cage,” the first (1964) pilot for Star Trek — which had been shown at Vintage Sci-Fi the month before. According to imdb.com, the reason Hunter didn’t stay with the series when NBC commissioned a second pilot and recast most of the leads was that Hunter’s wife convinced him that “science fiction is beneath you.” If Dimension 5 is an example of the sort of movie she thought Hunter should have been doing, he should have told her, “Honey, you’re a great wife but you’re a lousy agent.” Hunter isn’t the only “blast-from-the-past” name in Dimension 5: the female lead is France Nuyen, playing a preposterously named character called Ki Ti-Tsu and inevitably referred to by the other actors as “Kitty Sue.” (With apologies to the soul of Buddy Holly: “If you knew Ki Ti-Tsu, then you’d know why I feel blue … ”) They both work for a secret U.S. government espionage agency that Arthur C. Pierce doesn’t bother to name, though at one point when Hunter (whose character name, “Justin Power” — though the other actors frequently butcher it as either “Powers” or “Powell” — is almost as ridiculous as his co-star’s) calls his superiors he says, “Power calling Control,” and I momentarily hoped he was a colleague of Maxwell Smart and Agent 99 at their secret agency, CONTROL, on the TV show Get Smart! (and whose super-evil opponents were called KAOS). Alas, no such luck: instead of a spoof of the James Bond mythos this is a serious pastiche of it, ranging from the Don Giovanni-like exploits with women we’re told (but never actually shown) that Justin Power has had his way with (most of whom seem to be on the payroll of his employers — both the import company that’s his above-board ones and the secret espionage agency they cover for[1] — in the #MeToo era this film could barely have had a plot!) to the futuristic gimmicks with which Bond — oops, I mean “Power” (no, please, no Austin Powers jokes!) — is outfitted. One of these — and the only element of this movie that qualified it for “Vintage Sci-Fi” presentation — is a belt Power wears that can literally thrust its wearer either forward or backwards in time for up to … well, I vaguely recall its outer limit as eight weeks, but usually they just do 30 seconds at a time. The belt, of which we see two copies — one for Power and one for Tsu — looks like a cross between a boxing or wrestling championship award and Batman’s utility belt, and when it’s used the wearer instantly turns into a blue shadow before disappearing and reappearing momentarily, followed by a repeat of the last few feet of the film to indicate that the belt’s user is reliving immediately past events.
We first see this thing in operation in a confusing opening scene in which Power is driving an MG TE sports car and being chased by a Bell helicopter — one of those with a giant clear plastic cockpit that makes it look like a particularly demented and not especially airworthy giant insect — and he ducks into a cave, then disappears, then ducks into the same cave as the events repeat. Just what this was supposed to prove isn’t clear, but apparently it impresses the major-domos at Control — including Kane (Donald Woods, 35 years after he’d played James Cagney’s nicer brother in The Public Enemy), who made the thing — so they deploy it and issue one to Tsu. Our two intrepid agents use it to beat back an attempt by the sinister Chinese organization Dragon to smuggle an H-bomb into Los Angeles piece by piece (had Arthur C. Pierce seen the 1942 John Huston film Across the Pacific, in which Humphrey Bogart foils a similar Japanese attempt to bomb the Panama Canal and put it out of commission with a plane and a bomb similarly smuggled into the Canal Zone in pieces?); the good guys, including Power’s Asian sidekick Sato (Robert Ito), have captured a Dragon assassin and are about to subject him to torture (oops, I mean “enhanced interrogation”) via a device that looks like one of those giant plastic hoods attached to a chair that beauty salons used to have their women sit in so they could dry their hair and almost certainly was one of those devices. When they put the would-be assassin into the Hair Dryer of Doom and he’s tortured (oops, “enhanced”) by it, he gives away the secret of the H-bomb plot — but before they got him into the salon a Dragon agent disguised as an airport photographer shot and killed him with a gun disguised as a camera. No matter: Power just uses his Magic Time Gizmo to reverse time so that hasn’t happened yet, then armed with the foreknowledge of where the threat is going to come from, he’s able to detach himself from the agent and the Control people who are guarding him, jump the photographer and beat him up to make sure he doesn’t fulfill his mission. (Remember that director Franklin Adreon cut his teeth making Republic serials and so was going to use any excuse screenwriter Pierce gave him to have the characters pummel each other for long periods.)
Later Power inexplicably takes Tsu to a Cantonese restaurant even though, having just come from Hong Kong through the Philippines (where Dragon made their first attempt on the life of their captured assassin), Chinese food of any sort is about the last thing she wants. She specifically asks for a steak and potatoes, and Power insists that the chef there can make those items, albeit only by special order. They’re served personally by the owner of the restaurant, Kim Fong (Kang Tong), and his principal waitress, but what Power and Tsu don’t realize is both those people are Dragon spies who record their dinner conversation and play it back for Dragon higher-ups. Accordingly the restaurant owner gives Power a gold statue of an owl (which looks like a Chinese version of the Maltese falcon) which contains a bomb set to blow up 20 minutes after the price tag is removed. Twenty minutes after the price tag is removed — after some nice suspense work that reveals Franklin Adreon to be enough of a disciple of St. Alfred Hitchcock to follow his dictum that you have to tell the audience that a bomb is about to go off even though you keep the characters oblivious of that fact — Power is out of the car shopping at a convenience store when the car blows up. Tsu is seemingly in it, but later she turns up alive and explains that she sneaked into the store to check out their bikinis. (I’m not making this up, you know!) Why Power didn’t use his time-reversing belt to undo this event and throw out the owl on the rerun is a mystery — unless Pierce was setting it up that way because by this point in the plot Tsu hasn’t been given the belt or told how to work it — but it’s a disappointment for several reasons, including the fact that before the owl bomb blows it up Power has been driving a really cool car — a silver fastback Dodge Charger — and after it he’s issued a far less interesting car, a red Dodge touring convertible. (United Pictures must have had a promotion deal with Chrysler, because all the cars we see in both Cyborg 2087 and Dimension 5 are Chrysler products. I also wonder if they got a promotion fee from California Federal for having the helicopter at the start of Dimension 5 land on the roof of the California Federal building.)
The climax occurs at the Los Angeles piers, where a mainland Chinese company called Ming Imports is operating openly (in 1966, six years before the U.S. recognized Mao Zedong’s Communist regime as the legitimate government of China and reopened diplomatic and trade relations with mainland China — I just flagged this as a “Goof” on imdb.com) and serving as front for importing the bomb parts, and we finally get to meet “Big Buddha” (Harold Sakata), who’s in a wheelchair (did Arthur C. Pierce’s old-movie watching extend to Don Siegel’s 1958 San Francisco-set thriller The Lineup, in which the leader of the gang smuggling heroin into the U.S. through unwitting mules turns out to be a guy in a wheelchair, and the film’s protagonist, a hit man played by Eli Wallach, pitches him off the balcony of the Sutro Museum? And was the name “Big Buddha” inspired by “Big Brother” in George Orwell’s 1984?) but still isn’t wearing a shirt and showing off an incredible musculature that makes him easily the hottest male in this film. Power and Tsu try to disrupt his operation but ended up surrounded by Big Buddha’s goons. They’re about to be overpowered when, presto-change-o, Power hits the button on his time belt to send them three weeks back so when the three weeks are up (at least for the baddies; he and Tsu are in a separate Einsteinian space-time loop so to them, and to us, it’s instantaneous) they can overpower the baddies instead. There’s a cute tag scene in which Power tries to lay down marching orders to Tsu about their future relationship, and Tsu tries to steal the boat they took to get to the pier but Power jumps on it in time to sail with her to heaven knows where.
The most amazing thing about Dimension 5 is how dull it is: for something ostensibly genre-characterized as a “thriller” it has virtually no thrills, and the most entertaining sequence is a brief scene in the Manila airport in which a crabby U.S. couple (John McKee and Ruth Foster) complain that all the other people in the airport who are trying to kill each other are just going to delay their trip home. One has to feel sorry for Jeffrey Hunter, who on the advice of either his agent, his wife or both had walked out on what would become one of the most legendary, long-running and lucrative entertainment franchises of all time to do this piece of crap. In his Star Trek pilot “The Cage” he had had a richly complicated role that had challenged him emotionally and drawn from him a deep, rich performance (arguably deeper and richer than any ever given in the role by his replacement, William Shatner!); in Dimension 5 he’s the professional actor on autopilot, saying his lines and hitting his marks but bringing in almost no emotion in a role that, admittedly, didn’t leave much space for any (though one of the things that makes Sean Connery still the best James Bond — at least in my not-so-humble opinion — is that he was able to find little interstices in the Bond scripts in which he could fit real emotion into the role). Like Cyborg 2087, Dimension 5 is that sort of bad movie that isn’t good enough to be entertaining on its own merits and isn’t so bad it achieves camp appeal; the actors are acceptable enough, and Hunter and Nuyen are sufficiently capable one wishes they could have met and worked together on a film with a better script — but on its own it achieves a sort of comfortable slovenliness that marks a project no one who worked on it cared any more about than making sure they’d get the money they’d been promised for it.
[1] — In Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels, and the
earliest movies made from them, James Bond’s cover identity was also as an
executive with an import-export business. Bur almost no one remembers that.
