"One can always rely on the Americans to be completely logical."
In Las Vegas the police have been called to a disturbance. A man, Arnold Kramer (Peter Arne), is lying on the ground with his ear pressed hard up against it. He claims he can hear people underground burrowing like ants. The cops take him to a mental hospital. His sister Susan (Norma West) works in San Diego at a government scientific institute. She asks her boss, Commander Jonathan Shaw (Kerwin Mathews) to look into it.
A string of cave-ins convinces Shaw that there may be something to Kramer’s ravings. With special listening devises, (any everyone being really, really quiet for an hour or so) the Navy realizes that there is a network of tunnels underneath the United States by Communist Chinese saboteurs. (I guess if you can’t dig to China, they at least can dig to you.)
When Shaw explores one of the tunnels off a coal mine he discovers a chamber full of atomic bombs and manned by Chinese soldiers. Shaw and his team kill the soldiers and manage to disarm all but two of the bombs. The maniacal rogue Chinese General, Chan Lu (Martin Benson), is furious that his plan to blow up America is set back. He orders more bombs. In the meantime the Navy has captured the laser that the renegades use to bore their tunnels. They attempt to reverse engineer the devise.
“Battle Beneath the Earth” was released in 1967 and is a British film. It was directed by Montgomery Tully. It is a science fiction/thriller. And it’s just cool. The movie is complete with people sized pneumatic tubes, underground tanks and trains, hydro-sonic farms and white guys pretending to be Chinese. The Chinese bad guy Lu doesn’t have a white cat, but he does have a red-tailed hawk. The musical score is what is referred to as fast paced “crime-jazz”.
This is a good one. Even a bad movie, when you add a twist to it, gets my attention. This one started with a picture of the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada” sign and a guy with his ear to the sidewalk. Then you end up fighting Chinese renegades in a vast system of man made caverns underneath the US. Did not see that coming. It’s “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” TV series and the British TV series “The Avengers”. If you’ve ever loved either of those shows, you’ll have a ball with this. Its 91 minutes of campy TV spy movie nostalgia.