Battle Beneath the Earth (1967)

(On Cable TV, February 2021) I don’t think I’ll ever lose my sense of amazement at what can come up once you start poking through movie archives. Battle Beneath the Earth, produced in Great Britain by Irish director Montgomery Tully, is not a good movie—but it does have the kind of premise that sticks in mind: nothing less than the invasion of the United States by Chinese renegades through tunnels dug under the Pacific, and then in three tunnels spanning the United States. To say that it’s a crazy premise is understating things, but to its credit, the film does work overtime in trying to provide a halfway-plausible rationale. It also manages to tweak its premise in such as way that we get a warning from a scientist who’s not as crazy as everyone else thinks, early spectacular sequence and (thanks to a Hawaiian volcano and nuclear weapons) a way to end the threat in time for the end credit. No one will be surprised to realize that the film is incredibly racist in a variety of ways. Never mind the identity of the invaders when their leaders are played by actors in unconvincing makeup, and the film repeatedly lingers ominously on Asian extras. Paranoid doesn’t begin to describe the attitude of the film when it openly screams that invading hordes could literally spring from the ground. Battle Beneath the Earth is quite terrible and slightly enjoyable at once: the entire thing is just crazy enough to be interesting, and while it’s no surprise if the film has largely been forgotten today, it’s also a bit amusing to rediscover as a relic from an earlier time.