Purely Joyful Movie!

not horrible nor great

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

SUBMARINE SEAHAWK is a bog-standard WW2 story about the crew of an American submarine patrolling the waters in the western Pacific and getting involved in various scrapes and battles with their Japanese enemies. While the picture does attempt a little characterisation on those at the top, this is very much a sub-par movie compared to the true classics of the genre starring the likes of Richard Widmark who were able to fully realise the complexity of a man whose job it is is to care for his men while acting completely mercilessly towards the enemy. It doesn't help that the storyline has been done to death and much better in other instances.This picture was put out by Nicholson and Arkoff at AIP, a studio more at home making B-movie sci-fi or horror pictures. The only thing it really has going for it are some excellent, expensive-looking battle sequences, some of which seem to be actual footage from the war. I'm sure stock footage was used extensively and it really helps, because the script is dullish and the cast even more so. John Bentley, a British actor so good in various crime thrillers of the 1950s, is hard to swallow as the American captain and feels outside of his comfort zone. You just want him to come home and make more British films.

From humble beginnings this movie proved to be fairly engrossing, because you can't be sure which way it will go. It creates characters with some real human characteristics, both good and bad, and you will keep watching to find out just how they measure up to the rigours of submarine warfare. Sure it is low budget, but it still manages more realism and is more believable than many of today's Hollywood blockbusters.No problem with the sound quality or general image quality, and the battle scenes and submarine manoeuvres are fairly impressive. Some of the opening scenes which try to inject a bit of levity will seem a bit forced and dated to today's eyes, but this film is unusual in that it gets better as it proceeds, with the best bits at the end.

dumb dialogue, lousy acting, silly story, overly dramatic background music. It ends up being a satire or caricature of all the good submarine movies even though they were being serious when they made it. It uses every cliché of a submarine movie, crew members going nuts, sneaking thru minefields, torpedoes that miss, the captain following orders in conflict with the crew, getting depth charged, having to make repairs while the enemy is around. It's not a crew I would want to go to sea with, untrained, undisciplined. The main plot is implausible. I could see a movie of this quality coming out 20 years earlier when they cranked out propaganda movies for the war. The character development needs a little work. I'm not surprised the actors are unfamiliar to anybody.

When one Lieutenant Commander Paul Turner (John Bentley) unexpectedly gets assigned the lead of the Submarine Seahawk for an important undercover mission (to find out where missing Japanese warships are being hidden), the crew becomes more and more anxious as Turner again and again refuses to fire on enemy ships while taking them further and further into dangerous enemy territory.This is decent enough entertainment for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon if one is in the mood for a submarine war adventure tale. A couple of familiar faces in the cast doesn't hurt any either nor does some of the early lighter scenes which help us to identify more with the crew.