See also: “Release the hench-bats!”
(Image description: Scientist’s daughter struggles to keep her father from being seized by menacing scraggly mutant man-bats)
“There are no good bad movies anymore,” I have mourned, turning the pages of my well-thumbed Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film and listlessly sorting through recommendations on my YouTube feed. Boris Karloff discovers – too late! – that the principal side effect of his anti-gravity serum is homicidal mania. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in skin-tight Victorian frock coats debate the ethics of putting the brain of a rabid hamster into the skull of their developmentally disabled handyman Gork. Have I seen this before? Even if I haven’t seen it before, I’ve seen it before.
Well, rejoice with me, friends. Virginia, there ARE good bad movies still waiting to be discovered.
Enter Latitude Zero (1969). Produced by Toho Studios of Godzilla fame, this kaiju – well, can you call it kaiju if the “costumes” are primarily disemboweled stuffed animals? There was not a budget for rubber suits. There was not a budget for shag bathmat fur. I swear to you, those hench-bats were covered in velour – used velour. And the lion in the basement neurosurgery scene… it must have been a carnival prize. One of those oversized stuffies that are a pain in the neck to carry around all day, after you threw plastic rings around three milk bottles or whatever, but if you whine about it, your mom won’t give you any more money to try for the goldfish…
Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. Two Japanese scientists and one American photographer are rescued from a deep-sea submersible accident by an oddly opulent submarine of unknown origins… piloted by Joseph “I Was in Citizen Kane, You Know” Cotten, who turns out to the leader of a hidden Utopian community called “Latitude Zero.”
The three outsiders are given the full Disney Viewmaster “Cities of the Future” tour. (Did you know that in an ideal future, women will mostly wear shower curtains? Easy clean-up, I suppose – your guess is as good as mine.)
The folks at Latitude Zero periodically kidnap scientists on the verge of those sort of “peaceful discoveries” that will end up destroying the earth if in the wrong hands, and then give them the opportunity to continue their research in less fraught circumstances. They are the good guys.
The bad guy is Cesar Romero in thigh-high boots. Sorry to bury the lede. THE BAD GUY IS CESAR ROMERO IN THIGH-HIGH BOOTS. He is exactly the sort of hands that nobody wants “peaceful” death rays in, and he is pissed. He’s also getting nagged by his paramour Lucrezia (played by Patricia Medina, who seems like she ought to have been in some Fellini films but wasn’t), who thinks his chief lady-minion is getting too chummy. “I’ll take care of her,” he tells Lucrezia, “Once I get this latest peaceful-death-ray-scientist kidnapped as a lure to bring Joseph Cotten to me here on Bloodrock.” (Did I mention his lair is called Bloodrock?)
Before long, we’re down in the basement laboratory, and we find out that his source for good management practices comes from The Island of Lost Souls. What follows is one of the greatest scenes in good bad movie history.
Cesar’s approach to cross-species neurosurgery is refreshingly blithe. Amygdala, schmygdala! Ask your favorite four-year-old to play brain surgery with a teddy bear, and you’ve got the picture of what’s going on here. I expected to see a melon-baller on the tray of surgical instruments. Even Lucrezia is looking a little nonplussed as Cesar gleefully saws away at an enormous ersatz vulture’s wing like a woefully undermedicated uncle at Thanksgiving.
It is no spoiler to say that this does not result in long-term success for the Bloodrock organization. Yes, they are one giant griffon to the good… but it is not a happy griffon, and it is not a loyal griffon.
(Image: The King of the Island of Misfit Toys rains death on a miniature tank piloted by its creator)
Harvard Business School Case Studies editors take note: forcibly griffonizing an employee never results in a stronger team.
(Wouldn’t that be the greatest Ask A Manager letter ever? “I’ll admit, I had a crush on my boss, but I don’t think that should have resulted in him changing my species! I wasn’t even on a PIP!”
Or “This is my first job out of college, so I don’t know if I’m overreacting here. Should I be concerned if our grandboss is turning all my coworkers into mutant hellbeasts?”)
Sorry. I keep getting distracted.
Captain Joseph Cotten and his intrepid outsiders don gold lame jumpsuits and save the day. Two of the outsiders find shower-curtain-clad love and choose to stay in Latitude Zero, while the photographer returns to the outside world with a bag full of diamonds – that turn to dead leaves, like fairy gold, when he is trying to tell his story to his guffawing fellow journalists.
I love this film with all my heart. I keep saying to myself as I was watching, “Somebody MADE this! Somebody had this idea and got other people to MAKE this!”
I love the gusto with which Cesar Romero attacked his role. Everybody else was trying to keep it together – and you try to keep it together wearing a gold lame jumpsuit and saying, “Those damn rats keep gaining on us!” Or while wearing a shower-curtain and saying, “We’re not able to treat brain injuries like this on board. We need to abort the mission.” But Cesar? He was gonna have fun with this – The Thin Man, Batman, who cares as long as the checks clear? All of human art is on some level make-believe – no weirder to ask me to sympathize with a scorned hippogriff than a melancholy Danish prince. And no production of Hamlet has ever given me this much unalloyed pleasure.
If you’re donning a gold lame jumpsuit – or a shower curtain – to save the universe today, thank you. Thank you for your service.
(Image: a very serious team in gold jumpsuits at the submarine control panel.)
Latitude Zero is available free to stream on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/LatitudeZero