Back in 1969, my brother Mark and I saw a great double feature at the old Mesa theatre downtown, "Ice Station Zebra" and this long lost relic, CAPTAIN NEMO AND THE UNDERWATER CITY.
For nostalgia's sake, I ordered it from the Warner Archive collection of old MGM films, many of them the old sixties action films made in their London studios.
Aimed at kids (and a lot more enjoyable when I was our story finds five survivors of a sinking ship rescued by the reclusive Captain Nemo (Robert Ryan) and taken to his huge underwater city, Templemere, located 10,000 fathoms below the sea.
I don't know is 10,000 fathoms is anything near 20,000 leagues under the sea, but I KNOW that this film pales in comparison to that Disney classic.
Instead of Kirk Douglas, we get TV's Rifleman, Chuck Connors as a Senator and the gorgeous Lucianna Paluzzi (Thunderball) as a love interest living in our underwater dome.
The special effects are lame, the costumes are horrific and the models are pretty low budget too.
We're left with Ryan doing the best he can as Nemo, a pair of bumbling "comedic" brothers who want to steal Nemo's gold and a lot of lame dialogue.
I don't know how you'd swim from 10,000 fathoms to the surface without so much as a nosebleed, or why a giant manta ray goes from docile to angry when its bumped by a ship, but apparently the filmmakers do.
The Warner Archives is filled with films you haven't seen in years. But if anyone else is trying to Find this NEMO, let me save you the trouble.
This waterlogged cheapie should have stayed down tangled in the seaweed where it belonged.
Gurgles and fumbles its way to a D for all ages.
