Sandy just wrote me: “BATTLE BENEATH THE EARTH – just saw it last night and it was just goofy enough to be worth mocking, with fake Chinese villains and Kerwin Matthews(!) as the hero. You probably already own it of course. Anyway, it’s not a monster movie so there.”
Already did it as a Video Cheese back in the day (the Nov 2001 issue), but most of those never made it over here, so here’s a repost:
Plot: Dirty, stinking Chinese Reds are trying to undermine America. Literally!
The phrase ‘comic book’ movie means different things to different people. Many would be literal: A comic book movie is a movie adapted from a comic book. Director Joel Schumacher, on the other hand, obviously believed the term meant a garish film where things didn’t have to make much sense. Hence his two disastrously awful Batman movies.
To me a comic book movie is one set in a universe clearly not meant to be ours. The laws of science tend to be less rigorous, people and events are often a bit broader and more cleanly defined. Ideas that would be goofy in our universe, like people donning tights to fight crime, are simply assumed. Comic book movies, however, needn’t be about superheroes. Raiders of the Lost Ark, by this definition, is a comic book movie. Ditto Big Trouble in Little China. One of my favorite comic book movies is Horror Express, a film that manages to kick things off with a living caveman and proceeds to add another intellectually dubious plot premise every ten minutes or so, all while ably retaining the audience’s suspension of disbelief.
Battle Beneath the Earth, which proves a very odd duck, falls into this category, too. It’s basically a fantasy soldier comic come to life. Here military guys take the place of the fantasy spies more common to the period.
We open on the Strip in Las Vegas. Sorta. Actually, the film is shot almost entirely on sets, with stock footage used for establishing shots. A patrol car (driving ‘past’ a very obvious side projection) receives a report on a “listening disturbance” and goes to investigate. On the scene they find a crowd around an agitated man named Arnold Kramer. Shouting for quiet, Kramer lays with his ear to the ground. He keeps muttering about how “they’re all down there, crawling around like ants.” Apparently Listening Without a License was against the law in those days, and he’s arrested. Cue jazzy ‘60s ‘spy’ theme music and campy credit visuals.
Kramer, a seismic specialist, is institutionalized. He asks to see Jonathon Shaw (Kerwin Mathews!), a Naval Commander. Shaw himself is under a bit of a cloud at the moment. He was the designer of an underground laboratory that was destroyed in a mysterious incident, killing thirty crewmembers. Shaw goes to see Kramer — “He saved my life in Korea,” he informs somebody — but he himself doesn’t put much credence in what Kramer says. Not helping is that the scientist is hilariously elliptical, pretty much solely because the movie isn’t ready to show its cards yet.
Unconvinced, Shaw leaves and heads to a bar. A TV bulletin reports a mining cave-in in the very area of Oregon that Kramer was talking about. Thinking that pieces are starting to come together, Shaw heads for the office of the “Los Alamos (Underground) Atomic Detection Center”, or so a sign would have us believe. And I’m especially unsure about why they needed the parentheses about ‘Underground,’ but there you go. However, the personnel at the Center remain highly dubious about Kramer’s theories.
Shaw tours the collapsed mine to investigate further. (Does this guy have a job or anything?) Breaking through, he and the men with him discover a newly wrought tunnel with oddly smooth walls. They also find a medallion sporting the visage of a Chinese demon (!). Shaw returns to the Center with his information. It is determined that the tunnel was burned through the rock, presumably by some sort of advanced mining machine. “Such a machine is beyond our scientific knowledge at this time,” Shaw is told.
Kramer is brought in, vindicated but still bitter and somewhat jittery. He explains that in the course of his seismic investigations, he discerned lines of activity between China and the U.S. Shaw is sent in command of a squad of men — is this something a Navy officer would be doing? — to further investigate the tunnel he found. Hearing a noise, they hide and see a bizarre yellow tank-like vehicle drive by. (Get it? Yellow?) They follow this to a chamber where Chinese military personnel are guarding eight nuclear bombs. (!) The soldiers burst in and shoot down their opponents, after which they manage to disarm six of the bombs before being driven off by newly arrived troops.
These activities have put some kinks in the Chinese invasion plans, but haven’t stopped them. We soon meet the person behind all this, General Chan Lu. Chan Lu is right out of a James Bond novel. He’s a renegade – the Chinese government is powerless to control him, as they’re sitting on a nuclear bomb he put there – he’s as erudite as he is ruthless and he has a pet hawk (!). All good supervillains have pets, don’tcha know.
Kramer manages to create his own analog to the Chinese mining machines, which use twin lasers to burn through rock. Ours, however, is painted a more patriotic blue. Soon he and Shaw and Shaw’s squad are investigating a likely spot underneath a volcano. (One of my favorite things about this movie is that, despite the scope of the Chinese plot, Shaw is never assigned more than about fifteen guys. Another is that they sit around and wait for days on end before doing anything.) Also joining them is the beauteous Tila, a “top expert on volcanic passages.” Tila has next to nothing to do here, but presumably the producers thought the film needed a girl in it. Needless to say, she and the hero end up together, even though there is no particular reason to think they should.
One of the more disreputable aspects of the film is that all the major Chinese roles are played by Caucasian actors. Only the extras are actual Asians, and chances are this was more to save money on make-up than anything else. One wonders what the Asians actors thought about this. It’s hard to believe they were very happy with the situation, to say the least. 1967 might seem a little late for this kind of thing, but the same thing happened in the 1973’s big budget musical remake of Lost Horizon.
On the other hand, although obviously a film sporting an economical budget, things are professionally mounted. An MGM production, the movie is played straight and benefits from having an able, veteran cast. Of particular note is lead actor Kerwin Mathews, well known to genre fans for playing the title role in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Here he was in the midst of a downward slide that would eventually see him starring in junk like Octaman.
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Things I Learned:
- Mental institutions in Las Vegas have slot machines in the lobby.
- Bar patrons are fascinated by old Westerns, especially cattle stampede footage.
- Army Intelligence officers wear street clothes whilst on duty.
- The Chinese don’t have replacement triggers for their atomic devices. Remove them and they are totally neutralized.
- The fastest way to move around huge underground complexes is via man-sized pneumatic tubes (!).
- When magnetic tape super-computers had too much information to process, their tape spools unraveled.
- In an emergency, the military can order the stoppage of all mining, industrial and travel activities throughout the country.
- Flashlight beams are lethal.
- Female experts on volcanic passages must be warned that newly-lasered out tunnels, with the rock still smoking and glowing with heat, are “hot.”
- Seasoned Naval officers explain our secret military plans to civilians, need to know or not.
- Brainwashing requires about a minute of time and a small battery-operated fan and some really bad knock-off Dr. Seuss verse.
- Supervillains will always offer the hero a job, even though they keep getting turned down.
- Chinese cell guards are as dumb as all the rest of the breed.
- The half-crazy guy always gets killed in these things.
- In literally thousands of miles of tunnels, the lightly-guarded truck with the enemy’s atom bombs will park right near where the heroes are hiding.
- If the heroes kill some enemy soldiers, not only will their uniforms fit perfectly (and be utterly free of blood stains) but they will conveniently come equipped with goggles to hides their occidental eyes.
- Given ten minutes, you can outrun the blast radius of an atomic bomb.
- A massive nuclear device, exploded within ten minutes running distance of Hawaii, will not pose any sort of fall-out danger.
Summary: Enjoyable schlock for the ‘60s James Bond crowd.
