THE PHANTOM FROM 10,000 LEAGUES
1955
Directed by Dan Milner
Written by Dorys Lukather and Lou Russof
After a string of individual titles sold for flat fees to whatever exhibitors would take them, in the December of 1955, Samuel Arkoff and James Nicholson's American Releasing Corporation took its single largest stride towards becoming the small juggernaut we know as American International Pictures with their first-ever double feature package—Roger Corman's Day the World Ended and Dan Milner's The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues—which due to the realities of film distribution for the littler independent houses in the mid-1950s meant that, with the percentage deals this secured, this was also the first time they could have tasted real financial success. This doesn't mean either movie was an artistic success, because they weren't. They are at least two different kinds of bad—Day the World Ended is an outright obnoxious slog, whereas The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues is more soothing in its lousiness—though neither affords much honor to their mutual screenwriter, Lou Russof (mystery woman Dorys Lukather has a "story by" credit here, this being her only credit for anything ever), and The Phantom is probably the more obviously busted of the two films, mechanically-speaking.
In any case, it's perhaps more capable of being disappointing, because where Day the World Ended let you know very quickly that it was going to suck, and its low-down hood antagonist dropped into a post-apocalyptic scenario was going to be incredibly irritating throughout the entire movie, The Phantom starts off perfectly well, with the major caveat that a movie with this one's combination of budget and sensibility probably had a pretty low ceiling for its quality. Its director, Dan Milner, had been a poverty row professional going back twenty years or more by 1955, an editor on a great number of films I've never even heard of (a function he also performs here; and it's edited more-or-less fine, though with such an experienced editor you don't think you'd get such a baffling sequence as the one here involving shots of a beach-bound couple out on a date, from a distance that you're obviously not going to be able to make out their faces, that intercuts with our heroic couple also out on a date, which is pretty darned confusing until it it hits you with an "ohhhhh," several seconds after they die, that the former couple were nothing but unnamed body count characters). Milner only had one other directorial credit to date, however, exactly twenty years old in 1955—some crime movie called The Fighting Coward—and only the one afterward, another sci-fi/horror joint (this one for Allied Artists from the following year) called From Hell It Came.
Hopefully by then he'd learned what he'd apparently never been told by the time he directed The Phantom, which is the wise old saw that you should present your horror movie monster with dread and mystery, rather than shove it directly into your audience's face in the first batch of shots—surely, this had been established no later than the year before, with Jack Arnold's classic, Creature From the Black Lagoon—especially if your horror movie monster looks terrible, which this one's knock-off of, guess what, the creature from the Black Lagoon most assuredly does. (Portrayed by Norma Hanson, wife of the film's underwater advisor, Alfred Hanson, there's actually nothing that positively demands we perceive this "phantom" as male or as female, though there is a weird dog's-ear to the story here that implies that the Phantom is, in truth, naught but the radiation-mutated son of one of our secondary cast. This never pays off at all, presumably because somebody either told Rusoff he couldn't have the exact same ending for both his scripts for the December of 1955, or it only happened because Rusoff wasn't protecting himself against the cross-contamination that might naturally occur between two scripts being written more-or-less at the same time, and this interesting implication sprang out of complete automatism, or because Rusoff just forgot, which wouldn't be too much of a surprise given how this script feels like its last thirty minutes had to be written in, literally, that same amount of time.)
The best thing to say about this monster, anyway—its designer is unknown—is that it's not as completely indebted to Black Lagoon's gill-man as such knock-offs often were and, given this film's vintage, perhaps ought to have been. Indeed, while I'm confident it just couldn't be the very first gillsploitation film ever made, I've been stymied finding another one between this and Black Lagoon, notwithstanding Black Lagoon's own 1955 sequel, Revenge of the Creature, which doesn't count. (And, in perfect fairness, this is sufficiently dissimilar I'm not sure it really counts as a knock-off; but it seems more proximately inspired than, say, Corman's later sea monster movies.) Well, whatever: instead of a gill-man, and probably about as far off from "gill-man" as you could make a human swimmer in a suit, our Phantom suit is more like a Chinese dragon, by which I meana one-woman Chinese dragon parade float that still has humanoid arms and legs. And so it's awkwardly articulated, its occupant can't actually swim much in it or, probably, see out of it, and its complexion makes it look in any given shot like it's about thirty seconds away from disintegrating in the water. I reckon that it would still give you a startle, if you actually ran into it out on the ocean, but it has a hell of a time interacting with anything else, which somewhat limits how horrifying it can be. (Hanson could apparently puppet its jaws, so that's... something, I guess.) And, as noted, it's flung at us immediately, before the opening credits even, sort of gutting whatever enthusiasm you might've had when you started the movie scarcely a minute earlier.
What energy it retains isn't nothing, however, because I think we can be generous enough to spot any film from AIP's literal prehistory a pretty shitty-looking monster, and this energy manifests with the mysterious and moody discovery of the body of the fisherman that the Phantom (and/or the odd glowing undersea light the fisherman also witnessed) has just killed. One man finds the body, but upon realizing that there is another witness, quickly yet somehow casually retreats down the beach. That leaves us with "Ted Baxter," in truth Dr. Ted Stevens (Kent Taylor), though we won't find that out for a minute, who's accosted by yet a third witness, FBI agent William Grant (Rodney Bell)—who got there just in time to not see the first man—but both of them are being watched by an easily-made (and speargun-toting) George Thomas (Philip Pine), of the local college. The first man, it'll turn out, was the man Ted has come down to this beachside community to see, Professor King (Michael Whalen), George's colleague and seemingly head of the institution's combined marine biology and applied nuclear engineering program—and this odd pile-up of hunter and quarry presages a story that is, indeed, a three- or four- or maybe even five-way pursuit of the mystery represented by a sea monster that has by no means finished its bloodletting yet. Ted already knows that King was the man, and contrives to drop in on him at home—his attractive daughter Lois (Cathy Downs) is unsuccessful in shooing him off, though she has given the middle-aged professor enough time to abscond through his bedroom window—and King, for his part, knows that "Baxter" is the same scientist whose work he's continuing, the Ted Stevens who authored a couple of suggestively-titled texts of King's own intimate acquaintance, Biological Effects of Radiation On Marine Life and Nature's Own Death Ray.
Between the uncertainty of identity, the even greater uncertainty of loyalty, the snooping secretary Ethel (Vivi Janiss) with the son who "drowned" (and I guess really did drown, oh well) out there in the ocean on King's payroll, the intercession of nebulous foreign powers represented by the seductive Wanda (Helen Stanton)—and let's not forget that sea monster and the mad science and the death ray sitting out there on the bottom of the ocean—it sure feels like we have more than enough elements here for a pretty wild and woolly sci-fi thriller, that's as likely to get jammed up with too much incident as anything else. And I suppose that's sort of what happens (naturally, we've got a whole romance between Ted and Lois to deal with too), though it feels more like the movie's halting. The entire espionage subplot plum runs out of time, and spirals into anticlimax, and I think it might sum up the movie better than anything else to describe the sequence where one of our hero's faceless enemies places poison in his and Agent Grant's scuba gear, against the backdrop of the most suspenseful strains of Ronald Stein's score, and then let you know how much that ultimately matters: they discover the poison immediately, and it delays their dive into the ocean to go gawk at sea monsters and death rays for about forty-five seconds. This isn't the only way The Phantom seems to be going out of its way to not tie itself together into an effective, taut thriller—it's only, I think, the most representative (or maybe that's when Ted meets the Phantom early on, and treats this with only mild curiosity, with a level of urgency no greater than if he'd sighted a medium-sized shark). I suppose the most flamboyant of the ways it seems bound and determined to outright disjoint itself as a functional sci-fi thriller arrives only after practically everything's already been resolved, whereupon the movie realizes with a sudden jolt that it hasn't actually climaxed yet (and that, however notionally, it's still a creature feature and therefore its climax probably ought to have something to do with its monster); thus the death ray that has, heretofore, merely fatally irradiated people, and doesn't even appear to boil the water around it, now has the juice to blow up a Goddamn freighter.
In any event, it becomes pretty obvious that it has way too many moving parts for Russof to manage, hence how it spends the last 25 or 30 of its 80 minutes swirling manic-depressively around, while the term "mess" would connote too much excitement to be accurate. It's a pity, because there's a fair amount to have previously enjoyed, in a junky B-grade spy-flick sort of way, and your mileage may vary, but I'd probably include the science project at the heart of it, which is just so actively weird—weird enough that frankly the movie should be more aware of how weird it is to devote itself to the conspiracy surrounding a man's obsession with surreptitiously building a proof-of-concept superweapon out of an underwater hole full of uranium, for what appears to be the sheer hell of it. Meanwhile, it's altogether adequately acted, ranging from just-a-little-too-arch on the margins with Stanton's femme fatale to perfectly adroit in the cases of Taylor and Downs's leads to kind-of-actually-fun in the case of Whalen, who comes off more aware of the movie's low-rent, DIY circumstances than anybody else on either side of the camera; seemingly having nurtured an annoyance with a world that's never recognized his greatness, which is why he's stuck mutating turtles and calculating neutron propagation behind a barrel bolt at what appears to be a junior college, he's liable to erupt in haughty condescension against everybody, including mocking the very guy who wrote the damn manual for his own mad science ("Nonsense!"), and it's not Whalen's fault that Russof just gives up the game on Professor King's implicit menace as quickly as he does. Maybe the picture could've even survived the collapse of its screenplay, if only Milner had any particular directing chops, but while he's workmanlike enough to conjure threadbare intrigue, anything more muscular than that appears to have been beyond his ambit, or at least beyond his budget: the movie does have "action" but it's invariably pretty bad, capable of indicating, for instance, "Ethel's now taken a spear in the back," but never once capable of actually visualizing anything that complicated, even on the B-movie level you've agreed to meet it at.
For all that, The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues and Day the World Ended served their fateful purpose, and any fan of AIP will have to respect their achievement despite their hugely obvious crappiness, so even if an enormous amount of luck went into it, at least they were the right films for the right moment: the story I've heard goes that the double bill was being rejected right and left by exhibitors—gosh, really? but why?—until a newspaper strike in Detroit killed all the film advertising in what was, in the 1950s, a significant market for Hollywood product; when every other film company opted to delay releases in Detroit rather than blindly hope that people would still just show up at the box office without any idea of what they'd be watching, Arkoff and Nicholson swooped in with great optimism and the Detroit theaters, bereft of any choice, consented to run their godawful pair of sci-fi horror flicks. The audiences showed up after all. And thus was AIP born exactly as it would live the rest of its days: scrappy, opportunistic, and completely devoid of shame, and sometimes—increasingly often in the years to come—they'd somehow make some great damn movies that way after all.
Score: 4/10
That which is indistinguishable from magic:
- This is absolutely wild, but this stupid-ass fucking movie appears to have gotten the jump on the theoretical proposition of a natural nuclear reactor by several months, and while we know such things are possible now, one wasn't discovered until 1971 when an isotopic analysis of the uranium deposits in the Oklo region of Gabon established that in the pre-Cambrian those deposits had by geochemical happenstance wound up burning through far more of its U-235 than you'd expect in a self-regulating chain reaction. So somehow, in this one instance, Russof was on the cutting edge of actual science, sort of. Insanity.
- On the other hand, it wasn't some kind of atomic laser; this, in adorable 50s sci-fi gobbledygook fashion is attributed to the combination of the uranium deposit that King's discovered and the full activation of heavy isotopes of water, and like, I don't even know what that means.
- Ted, holding forth upon the mutations of fish, declares that "marine life lives in a constant flow of heavy water," and like, so do we, I guess, if you mean "water that has deuterium in it at all, which isn't remotely uncommon." If you mean "water that is substantially deuterated," then sigh, no they don't, because they'd outright die, probably within a few minutes, due to its rather different biochemical properties.
- And on the subject of "marine life," I don't think an obvious freshwater turtle counts.
- Quite possibly the most Goddamn pig ignorant title in all the annals of mid-century science fiction.
The morality of the past, in the future!:
- Downs has a scene where she's just straight-up in her bra. Bold new horizons of cinema open up before us; I didn't know you could do that yet.
- I guess the government really doesn't need a warrant when their target has pissed off as many of his acquaintances as Professor King has, who are happy to break into his office for you.
- Speaking of King making enemies, in a fit of self-loathing, the professor absolutely trashes his laboratory, including the mutant turtle tank, right in front of the janitor (Pierce Lyden), and he has no compunction whatsoever about barking at the poor dude to start cleaning it up. And when King was working, he had a radiation suit on... the exigence for King's tantrum, incidentally, was his guilt over all the people he's harmed with his irresponsibity.
Sensawunda:
- The janitor declares that turtle to be an abomination. I think he's being a little excessive, this movie doesn't have remotely the imagination or the effects budget for that.
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