Battle Beneath the Earth

I didn't intend to do two low-budget sci-fi films from the 60s in relatively close proximity aftr Valley of the Dragons, but I noticed another such movie sitting on my DVR that's getting an airing on TCM soon: Battle Beneath the Earth, at 11:30 AM tomorrow (Nov. 7).

The movie starts off with an absurd scene. A couple of policemen patrol the Strip in Las Vegas when they find that their night is going to involve them going to a call for a "listening disturbance", whatever that is. When they get to the location of the call, they find a man claiming to be a scientist, Arnold Kramer (Peter Arne), with his ear to the sidewalk and claiming that he can hear some sort of tunneling going on beneath the surface, which of course nobody else is going to be able to hear considering how loud the Strip is. The cops obviously can't hear it, but at the same time Kramer isn't really breaking any laws. So the most they can do with him is stick him in a mental hospital where he'll be in a padded room.

Somehow, US Navy Commander Jonathan Shaw (Kerwin Mathews) hears about what's happened to Kramer. Shaw had worked in undersea tunneling, and from what he can glean of the details, he gets the feeling that perhaps there might just be something to what Kramer was claiming. This, combined with several landslides and mining disasters that are otherwise unexplainable, makes Shaw really want to find out what Kramer knows, so Shaw goes to visit Kramer, eventually getting Kramer released when he hears the full story.

The military starts doing a bit of digging of their own, pun intended, in a fairly ridiculous scene that involves getting pretty much all underground activity in America to cease so that the military can listen. (There's no mention of how much panic this causes in the general US population, or how they were able to keep it a secret.) What they discover is that Communist China (remember, the movie was releasd a year or two into Mao's Cultural Revolution, at a time when most western nations still didn't have diplomatic relations with the PRC), or at least renegade PLA general Chan Lu (Martin Menson), has tunneled all the way under the Pacific, and gotten to under the USA!

Now, this doesn't lead to an immediate declaration of war, or even a general mobilization of troops, but a small expeditionary group being sent into the tunnels to to to figure out what's going on without Gen. Lu finding out about it. Of course, Lu does find out, and captures some of the good guys. But he's also got a lot of hubris, so the good guys are going to be able to escape and save the day in the end.

Battle Beneath the Earth is, unsurprisingly, a totally ridiculous movie from start to finish. It's got so many plot holes that in theory, it ought to require too much suspension of disblief to watch. But that's not really an issue here. Instead, it's one of those movies that's so idiotic that it's fun to watch to see just how much dumber it's going to get. And believe me, it can get a lot stupider.

So although on an objective basis you'd have to say that Battle Beneath the Earth is terrible, it's one of those movies that gets things so wrong that it would be fun to sit down with a bunch of friends and laugh together at how shoddy the production is.