One evening, strange gill men from the ocean come into the house through a secret passage and kidnap Jill and, after some silly frippery, Ben and Harold find the secret door and make their way through catacombs until they reach a whirlpool and eventually fall through it. At the same house is the lovely Jill, played by Susan Hart, who is the ward and assistant of an eccentric painter named Harold Tufnell-Jones, played by David Tomlinson. Hunter plays Ben, an American living in England and staying at a boarding house in the early 1900s. had just ended and he was looking for any work he could get. The film stars Tab Hunter, a matinee idol whose contract at Warner Bros. And, weirdly, it also tried to be an undersea action movie.
Tourneur’s style fit right in with Arkoff and Nicholson’s American International Pictures and with these last two movies was directly trying to capitalize on AIP’s Poe cycle directed by Roger Corman and hence has big sets, gorgeous period costumes, and my favorite kind of colorful cinematography of the era. It’s probably this reason that the 1965 sci-fi adventure film City Under the Sea, loosely based on the Edgar Allan Poe poem “The City in the Sea,” got its name changed to the infinitely more evocative, and infinitely less correct, War-Gods of the Deep.ĭirected by French filmmaker Jacques Tourneur-whose previous credits included the ’40s horror pictures Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie and the brilliant Film Noir Out of the Past- War-Gods of the Deep was to be his final film, and second one featuring Vincent Price following 1964’s The Comedy of Terrors. These titles let you know pretty much exactly what’s going to happen in them, or at least that something real weird is bound to happen.
Something like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or I Was a Teenage Werewolf or The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant. If there’s one thing I love, it’s a blatantly audacious title something that really grabs the viewer’s attention.
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