- Arriving well after public interest in flying saucer movies surely must have peaked, Spencer Gordon Bennet's The Atomic Submarine dares to ask: what if there were an underwater UFO? The answer, naturally, is that it would battle ships and submarines instead of tanks and airplanes. For most of the film, the battle is pretty one-sided as "The Cyclops" (as it is called) sinks ships left and right throughout the Arctic circle. A submarine crew, led by Captain Wendover (Dick Foran) and Lieutenant Commander "Reef" Holloway (Arthur Franz), is dispatched to identify the cause of these sunken ships, which a couple of eccentric scientists (Tom Conway, Victor Varconi) correctly deduce must be a UFO. One of the scientists even has a spare photo of a flying saucer in his cabin, in case that turns out to be relevant.
- While the human side of the story is nominally centered around the largely unlikeable Reef and his peacenik bunkmate Dr. Neilson (Brett Halsey), the real measure of a movie like this is the quality of its visuals. The underwater scenes are merely okay, with a model submarine and some big rocks demanding a lot of the audience's imagination. The alien creature, however, is considerably better, with a giant probing eye and creepy tentacles. Why it ever decides to reveal its plan to Reef is anybody's guess, but at least it has the good sense to melt several of his crewmates before doing so. As in many such films, the solution is indeed to blow up the UFO, which the film accomplishes with some impressive stock footage of a real explosion. Now that aliens have occupied air, space, and water, maybe humans should just move underground!
