![]() we’ve got a conspicuously untalented artist named Harold Jones (David Tomlinson, from Dominique is Dead) and his inseparable companion, Herbert the Hen (yes, I realize hens are by definition female- I’m fairly certain that’s actually the point of the “joke”), a slew of non-entities who mainly sit around looking distrustful and complain about how much better the world was before the discovery of electricity, and a young American woman named Jill Turgillis (Susan Hart, from The Slime People and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini). After some superstitious mumbo-jumbo from the fisherman, Harris (Tab Hunter, whom you may remember as Todd Tomorrow from John Waters’s Polyester) returns to the mansion to tell the other people there about the lawyer’s demise. the so-called story: It all starts when an American college professor named Ben Harris (who is in Cornwall on business that the movie never bothers to explain) discovers, in the company of several local fisherman, the apparently drowned body of the lawyer with whom he had that unexplained business washed up on the beach below the hilltop manor house at which he and the lawyer had been staying. I like it about as much as I ever like poetry, but it offers damn slim pickings as the basis for a movie script. No, what we have here is a movie which claims to have been inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “City in the Sea,” which, though it’s actually a pretty cool poem, consists of nothing more than a two-page description of a sinister aquatic city, a sort of Lovecraftian anti-Atlantis a good half-century before Lovecraft. I’m not talking about epic poetry here- it probably would be worth trying to make a movie out of the Iliad or Dante’s Inferno, and there actually is a delightfully insane movie based on the Kalavala (it’s called The Day the Earth Froze/Sampo, and maybe one day I’ll get around to reviewing it). Where else can you see a highly respected old-time Hollywood director like Jacques Tourneur (of Cat People and Curse of the Demon fame) flailing so helplessly to make sense out of such an empty, imbecilic, disordered script? How often do you see a movie so hopeless that even the incomparable screen presence of the one and only Vincent Price comes across as nothing more than a doomed exercise in turd-polishing?īut hey, that’s what you get when you go and make a movie out of a poem. It’s not funny, it’s not fun, but it is morbidly fascinating. War-Gods of the Deep is a real train-wreck of a movie, and to watch this film is to be amazed that the career of anybody involved could possibly have survived. Unfortunately, little good comes of all that deceptive lavishness. Though it was budgeted at little or no more than The Fall of the House of Usher had been, it appears far more expensive than it really was because so many elements of the sets and whatnot had already been paid for in the outlay for one of its predecessors. ![]() The first of AIP’s ostensibly Poe-derived movies that was not directed by Roger Corman, War-Gods of the Deep displays to fine effect the good sense that underlay that studio’s policy of hanging onto practically every prop and piece of scenery that had ever been ordered for one of its productions. War-Gods of the Deep/City Under the Sea/City in the Sea (1965) *
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