A trio of intrepid explorers, Dr. Tashiro (Akira Takarada), Dr. Masson (Masumi Okada) and annoyingly rude American reporter Lawton (Richard Jackel) are on a deep-sea diving mission, when a beautiful model underwater volcano erupts a little too close to their bathysphere. Fortunately, the sub-marine of humanitarian genius Captain Craig McKenzie (Joseph Cotten, probably slumming, certainly having fun) is close by.
McKenzie is the founder of a secret utopian society of scientists and other do-gooders based in an underwater city called Latitude Zero.
As our heroes will soon see, it's a very late Sixties kind of utopia, a place where funky architecture meets glowing buttons, where women wear vinyl, gold and short skirts, where no man (not even Joseph Cotten) likes to keep his breast fully covered and where the wondrous is the ordinary.
Of course a good genius needs an evil genius as his archenemy. McKenzie has his nemesis in form of Malic (Cesar Romero), a specialist in the creation of nonsensical chimeras like ape-bat-monsters, cute little attack bats and his crowning achievement, a lion-costume/vulture-costume-hybrid with the brain of his betrayed lover. He will - in contrast to my own feelings - be very surprised to learn the creature doesn't like him all that much.
The feud between the two men comes to a climax when Malic kidnaps Dr. Okada (Tetsu Nakamura), a scientist just on his way to Latitude Zero.
McKenzie and his new-found friends pay a visit to Malic's charmingly named island lair of Blood Rock. Will magical science like their jet-packs and their imperviousness to bullets help our heroes win the day? What are the giant rat costumes planning? Is vinyl the future of fashion?
If you haven't got it by now, let me tell you: Latitude Zero is a very silly movie, full of gorgeous late Sixties production design, monster costumes so cute, you want to cuddle them and actors playing gamely along with every silly idea director Ishiro Honda can come up with. As the friend of Toho Studios' kaiju and SF movies will understand, this means an astounding amount of silliness that would be enough to fill two or three comparable American movies. Fortunately, Honda never believed in a less is more aesthetic and prefers to deliver simply more of everything.
Of course, Latitude Zero is not a masterpiece, but very fun pulp SF that steals only the best from Jules Verne without all that pesky science.
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