Watch Latitude Zero For Free

hyped garbage

The first must-see film of the year.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

This is one of the finest of the non-Godzilla epics by Ishiro Honda and Toho. It definitely has all the elements that make for a great film great story, great action and an interesting twist at the end. What really stands out is the fact that Honda pretty much took a near impossible situation in working with several American actors who didn't speak Japanese and was able to do a decent job in directing them. However, the thing that really was interesting about this film was the fact that this film marks what probably is the first and only time that Akira Takarada and the late, great Akihiko Hirata are heard speaking English with their own voices after years of being dubbed. This film is definitely one of the finest to come from Toho.

This is a bigger budgeted film than usual for genre director Honda (with more evidently elaborate sets) – though the special effects still have that distinctive cheesiness to them (witness the giant bats and rodents on display). It also utilizes a surprising number of American actors: Joseph Cotten playing the visionary scientist looks ill-at-ease and frail (but, then, his character is supposed to be 204 years old!), an innocuous Richard Jaeckel is the photographer hero while, as chief villains, we get Cesar Romero and Patricia Medina (both essentially campy). As I've often said, I grew up watching English-language films dubbed in Italian…but hearing Hollywood actors in Japanese is another thing entirely! LATITUDE ZERO feels like a juvenile version of a typical Jules Verne adventure, and is fairly entertaining on that level; indeed, it's preferable to Honda's low-brow variations on the monsters-on-the-rampage formula because of the inherent quaint charm of the set-up in this case. The plot involves the kidnapping of a famous scientist by Romero – he was intended to establish himself in the underwater, technologically advanced city devised by Cotten (to which the world's foremost minds are being recruited). We're treated to plenty of silly battles between the rival subs, but the most amusing scenes are certainly the raid on Romero's cave – in fact, Cotten doing somersaults and fending off men in rubber suits (via flames and laser emitted from his glove!) must surely count as the nadir of his acting career; the other elder in the cast, Romero, is more in his element – after all, he had been The Joker in the BATMAN TV series and movie of the 1960s! Cotten has a scantily-clad blonde physician on his team, and is assisted by a hulking Asian; Romero, on the other hand, is flanked by an Oriental femme fatale – who, however, ends up getting a raw deal for her efforts (the girl's brain is eventually transplanted into a hybrid of lion and condor…which is among the phoniest-looking creatures you ever saw!). Apparently, a 2-disc set of this one from Media Blasters streets on this very day!!

Irwin Allen's 1978 Captain Nemo featured old time Hollywood stars - Jose Ferrer and Batman's Burgess Meredith - doing battle with each other in studio-tank-bound submarines with memorable music scoring the show. Latitude Zero (1969) has old time Hollywood stars - Cotten and Batman's Romero - doing battle with each other in studio-tank-bound submarines with memorable music scoring the show!However, the middle sections of Latitude Zero are set in an underwater city with no subs to be seen, but still, those early scenes of Zero are very Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea/Nemo-ish, in fact I almost felt like I discovered some long lost Irwin Allen production when recently viewing Latitude Zero for my first time! The colourful lines given to Cotten and Romero are what stand out in my memory more than anything else.The film is cool.

Another memory from my childhood! I was about 7 or 8 years old when I saw this film and it really freaked me at this time! Recently, I watched "Ido zero daisakusen" again and it had great nostalgia-values!! Giant rats, bat-like creatures... this flick directed by Godzilla´s spiritual father Ishiro Honda has everything a great Japanese monster movie needs! Plus the great performances of Richard Jaeckel, who made some extraordinary alien-experiences in "The Green Slime" as well as Cesare Romero, unforgettable as sneering bad guy Joker in the 1960s Batman-series! The biggest surprise however was the appearance of Joseph Cotten, an actor that also starred in the Orson Welles-classic "Citizen Kane" or Carol Reed´s "The 3rd Man"... so he´s next to Russ Tamblyn or Raymond Burr a further US-actor who can add a Japanese Sci-fi movie to his filmography. "Atragon II" may be a little bit cheesy compared to nowaday´s standard (Which Asian monster flick from those days is not?!?), but all the multimillion Dollar CGI-F/X can´t deal with the great naive charm this film delivers! A cult classic!!!