The Milner Brothers tell you this movie is cut rate right from jump street. It's there in the title: "The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues", it lets you know you are getting fifty percent of the leagues Disney gave you two year's earlier. The title is a bit misleading, though. The titular "phantom" is barely in the picture. Despite the fact that the movie starts right off with the creature attacking (well, it's more like pawing) a fisherman in a rowboat, what the film is mainly concerned with is people talking endlessly, usually on the beach in suit's.
The "phantom" creature is an impossibly goofy looking thing, a near immobile "Creature From the Black Lagoon" knock-off with a macrocephalic dragon head. When the dead fisherman's body washes ashore, it's found by the only two people on the desolate stretch of beach: William Grant (Rodney Bell), a government agent, and "Ted Baxter" (Kent Taylor), who introduces himself as a "tourist and beach comber", but is really Dr. Stevens, a world renowned oceanographer, who has studied the effects of radioactivity on marine life. The production clearly had access to a small stretch of beach to film on, and it's the stage for much of the film. There's a completely unintentional bleak poetry to many of the beach scenes, looking something like the California schlock version of a Bergman film.
Watching the two men from a hiding spot is George Thomas (Phillip Pine), a shady character who in his first scene is as he is in almost all his scenes: holding a spear gun. Seriously, he is almost never without one. George is after the atomic secrets of the mysterious Professor King (Michael Whalen). He's the true villain of the piece. It should've been titled, "The Guy Named George From the Beach", but I guess that doesn't really put asses in the seats. The nefarious interests George works for are represented by a blond named Wanda (Helene Stanton). In an odd but kind of cool move that may be artistic, but is more than likely lazy, she just sits under a parasol on the beach for almost the entirety of her screen time.
Prof. King looks like a doughy, rumpled version of Robert Ryan and delivers wonderfully hammy overwrought dialogue, as when he addresses his secretary, "Ethel, I consider you an intelligent woman. A bit bitter, perhaps. No great lover of mankind, but still intelligent..." His laboratory emits really neat electronic sounds and it's here he irradiates a turtle and I think turns it into the phantom. I think. I'm not really sure. The movie is kind of unclear on that. It's kind of unclear on a lot of things.
Milner shows a bit of noirish panache when he uses Ethel's (Vivi Janiss) shadow to give away that she is eavesdropping on King and Stevens. Now, I'm not saying the guy is an expressionist wunderkind, just that it demonstrates at least some degree of creative ingenuity when it comes to the visuals and I wanted to give some kind of prop's to this movie I'm not being very nice to. Milner even manages to slip a little cheesecake into the mix when Dr. Stevens stops by the Professor's place at the very same time his daughter, Lois (Cathy Downs), is taking a shower.
Taylor is a classic fifties B cinema leading man- great hair, some clothes I'd kill for and a bit too old for his love interest. During a long rambling scene he tells the Professor he knows "There's a shaft of light coming up out of the ocean, I have reason to believe it's nuclear in character...", he's seen the monster guarding it firsthand and fears the light could be weaponized. I watched the scene twice in an attempt to decipher it's nonsensical pseudo scientific prose, but both times my eyes glazed over with disinterest. But, the concept of a monster guarding a powerful column of light does have a certain kind of mythological resonance, as if Milner is taking primal archetypal imagery and rendering it down for the drive-in make out crowd.
There's a contract with the audience when it comes to older B creature features: stick with the movie through the plodding plot build up and you'll be rewarded with the monster stuff you actually came for at the end. "Phantom From 10,000 Leagues" violates that contract. The poor phantom is a bit player in his own movie, barely having any screentime. In the "Black Lagoon" rip off power rankings, this dude is below "The Monster of Piedras Blancas" and "The Horror of Party Beach".
The Milner Brothers "From Hell It Came", made two years later, represents fifties psychotronic cinema at it's most batshit fun, unfortunately "Phantom From 10,000 Leagues" represents it at it's most boring and snooze inducing; a thoughtless programmer designed just to kill time and fill a slot on a double bill. The fact that a movie containing almost nothing but talking could have so little plot is a miracle. This flick barely counts as a story, hell it barely qualifies as a movie. It's a midnight movie that will have you asleep by 12:15.
