|
BATTLE BENEATH THE EARTH ![]() ![]() Director Montgomery Tully adopts the documentary-like stolidity of most 1950s action films and everything comes with a heavy-handed didacticism. There is a crude, pedestrian vigour to the film the same sort of crude excitement most 1950s war films operated on. Many scenes often come across as silly like one where Peter Arne is brainwashed by a Chinese woman using a handheld fan, or the conceptually daft scene where the military organise the entire US to make no sound for thirty minutes so they can detect the noise of the underground operations. The film is also often undone by poor special effects the laser is simply a spotlight beam and the explosions are double-exposed fireballs.
Irish-born director Montgomery Tully specialised in so-called British quota quickies, making over fifty films (mostly crime thrillers) between the mid-40s and Battle Beneath the Earth, the last film he made before he retired. He made two other ventures into science-fiction with The Electronic Monster/Escapement (1960) about dream programming and the alien abduction film The Terrornauts (1967).
Trailer here:- Full film available online here:- |