The Atomic Submarine (1959, Spencer G. Bennet) (Patreon)

31/100

Help me, Boris Karloff, you're my only hope! (He stars in the two remaining turn-of-the-'60s sci-fi films that Criterion packaged as a boxset called Monsters and Madmen; I dearly hope that Karloff's presence will make those a marked improvement upon this one and the only slightly less dire First Man in Space.) Submarine movies benefit from an inherent claustrophobic tension, and taking no advantage of that whatsoever must have required a coordinated lack of effort—in any event, Atomic Sub's first act is comatose, just blandly mediocre actors reciting deadly, soporific exposition. And your impatience finally gets rewarded with one of the goofiest ideas this genre ever produced: a flying saucer (looking exactly like the '50s template in every respect), but underwater. "That would make our little green men actually little green fish," someone says, and I wish the line were clearly intended as camp comedy, but that is so very not the case. Flying/swimming saucer at least looks better than the sub itself, represented in exterior shots by a model that's remarkably chintzy even for the era, never escaping one's initial impression of a children's toy. I'll give the film credit for inventive, mostly non-humanoid alien design, as well as for the saucer employing a defense mechanism (when fired upon by torpedoes) that's weirder and more interesting than the standard force field. And I suppose it could also serve as the basis for a drinking game in which everyone winds up unconscious after downing a shot each time any character pronounces "Arctic" as "Artic."