Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea [Blu-ray]

60's Sci Fi at its best
Sure, the science is implausible. But this film employs enough plot devises and not-half-bad special effects to make it a real party flick. The two real treats in the film: (1)An aging but always fascinating to watch Peter Lorre, chain-smoking his way through some pretty dumb lines, and (2) Barbara Eden in a skin-tight naval "uniform," as the admiral's personal assistant, jiggling about the submarine, and even going topside, in 6-inch spike high heels. What fun!
Thrilling 1960's Sci Fi Drama That Spawned The Series
Viewing Irwin Allen's sci fi drama "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea", recently after many years was like going back in time to the days when I would race home from school to see the next exciting episode of the popular series that this film spun off into. Viewed critically by viewers nowadays for the simple special effects and often absurd science on display, I see it rather as simply a very enjoyable 100 minutes of good old fashioned science fiction which for the time was very state of the art. Remarkably the film still holds up well for the most part with the great Seaview atomic submarine and the still quite frightening effects of the sky being on fire and melting the Polar Caps, being the real standouts in terms of special effects technology. For a film of this type it has a quite memorable cast in acting veterans Walter Pidgeon, Joan Fontaine, Peter Lorre, and Henry Daniell combining very well with such "younger generation" performers as Frankie Avalon, Barbara Eden and Michael...
A Green-Washed Seaview
I can just imagine the marketing department at Fox scouring its archives for products it can tie in with today's environmental concerns. The "Global Warming" edition of the Voyage movie is a rather obvious repackaging of an old product with a glitzy extra or two, but the association with climate change is a stretch. In the movie, the sky catches fire and Earth's temperatures rise dramatically. Global warming, indeed.

I was happy to see the movie released with extras such as an isolated music track, commentary, and production gallery, but disappointed with the quality of each of the features. The music track is well recorded, but unlike the special edition of "Fantastic Voyage," there's no dialog to fill the passages which have no music. Long stretches of silence are the result.

With the commentary playing, I found myself groaning every time Voyage "expert" Tim Colliver launched into another of his glib ad-libs, which were riddled with obvious grammatical errors...
Click to Editorial Reviews