THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE (1959)

Mysterious problems are threatening military submarine traffic in the Arctic Sea near the North Pole, with some ships either being destroyed or vanishing after seeing a strange glowing light. A meeting of the Arctic Theater powers leads to navy commander Holloway (Arthur Franz) heading up a trip on a submarine called the Tiger Shark which has been outfitted with new high-tech tracking equipment. He's excited to be joined by the equipment's inventor, an old buddy named Neilson, but then he discovers that it’s Neilson's son (Brett Halsey) traveling in place of his ailing father. The son is a pacifist and is known for calling his dad out publicly as a war monger, and Holloway constantly (and unprofessionally) picks fights with Neilson. Their squabbling comes mostly to a halt when a strange electrical storm hits the Tiger Shark. Soon, the crew discovers a pattern of storms that have encircled the North Pole, coinciding with places where other ships were hit. Could this be an alien intelligence of some kind keeping man away from the pole? When they discover an underwater UFO with a single glowing "eye," they call it Cyclops and try to make contact. They ram the spaceship and enter, eventually meeting up with a Cyclopian creature who kills some of them but also establishes telepathic contact with Holloway, and he learns that the ship, which is a living thing, plans to head back to its home planet and return with a colonizing force. Can Holloway and Neilson manage to work together to save the Earth?

It takes a while for this talky movie to get going, and even when it does, it's only occasionally interesting. Generally, the effects--the miniatures, the alien--are cheap and not terribly effective, but the interior of the spaceship, with an almost surreal dark and empty look, is effective (pictured) and worth hanging around for. Even the climax is fairly hum-drum; the narrator has to get us worked up when he tells us about the plan to attack the escaping spaceship at the end: "It was foolish, it was insane, it was fantastic!" Franz lazily blusters his way through the movie in an unlikable way. Halsey, young and handsome, is only slightly more bearable--he spends most of the movie with a pitiful, wounded puppy dog look on his face as he somewhat masochistically lets Franz berate him. Old-timers Dick Foran and Tom Conway are fine in supporting roles. Busty blond Joi Lansing has a small role as Franz's lust interest, and the end is basically a silly punch-line delivered by Franz about the alien ship getting away with his little black book. Not a waste of time but not essential viewing. [DVD]