Neptune is the Roman Poseidon

I only did a brief post on The King and Four Queens this morning for two reasons. One is becaus of how long it's been since I watched it; the other is that I was planning on doing a full-length review of a different movie today: The Neptune Factor, which will be on FXM Retro tomorrow morning at 3:00 AM and 1:20 PM.

A research group has an Oceanlab on the sea floor somewhere out in the mid-Atlantic. (The latitude and longitude the give place it somwhere not too far northeast of Bermuda, I believe.) Dr. Andrews (Walter Pidgeon) is leading the research on the ship up on the surface, while among others, head of the divers MacKay (Ernest Borgnine) starts off in Oceanlab below. But he gets sent up to accompany a fired guy, and this happens just in time. Just before they surface, there's a giant undersea earthquake! Among the effects of the earthquake is to unmoor Oceanlab and send it... somewhere. They can't locate the emergency beacon.

The emergency authorities are overwhelmed, but there's a nuclear sub not too far off, which could help assist in the search. Andrews and company want to get the search on quickly, since it's theoretically possible that the people aboard Oceanlab survived and they've only got seven days' air supply. (I'd think it more likely that they end up like the Kursk submarine, but that would make for a non-commercial story.) Sadly, the folks in the submarine determine that if Oceanlab is intact, it fell into a fissure, and the submarine is too big to enter the fissure.

So the folks on the ship above need a small, maneuverable bathyscaphe, and quickly. There is one, but who knows if it will be able to find Oceanlab in time. That ship is captained by Commander Blake (Ben Gazzara), and he takes along as a crew MacKay, another diver, and scientist Jansen (Yvette Mimieux), who is clearly along because the movie needs eye candy and presumably Raquel Welch wasn't available. Blake and MacKay argue, and in the fissure the crew finds some marine life the likes of which they've theoretically seen before, but never quite like this....

The Neptune Factor is one of those movies that has a reasonably good idea at the base of it. It's reminiscent of Fantastic Voyage or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea thematically. And yet The Neptune Factor winds up failing pretty badly. I think there are multiple reasons for that, but chief among them is the script. It's slow, slow, slow, and just when you think it's not slow enough it gets slower. Nothing really happens much of the time, as the bathyscaphe crew just sit there and look out the portals.

The script also has some serious continuity issues. There's talk early on about divers being too deep while the Oceanlab is still moored, yet one of the divers is able to exit the submersible when it's even deeper in the fissure. There's also talk about who the pressure that deep would have crushed Oceanlab, but that pressure is apparently not too much for the diver. As with most movies underwater and in caves, the lighting is much too light, but there's not much that can done with this most of the time and still have a movie.

The final problem is the special effects. I know that this was still the early 1970s and effects were nowhere near as advanced as they are now, but the creatures seen at the bottom of the fissure made me think that the makers of The Neptune Factor were borrowing ideas from Night of the Lepus on how to do effects. It's terrible and totally defies reality. Wait until you see the eels.

Still, The Neptune Factor is silly enough for one viewing. Watch and judge for yourself.