MovieChat Forums > The Atomic Submarine (1959) Discussion > Saw Original Release in Theater

Saw Original Release in Theater

posted 16 years ago by muvphreek
9 replies | jump to latest

I remember seeing the original release of this film in Winter, 1960 (I was 13) in a local theater and it scared me witless! I had nightmares from it for months afterward. I guess in my case, this movie served the purpose intended... to frighten it's viewers. I'd gone to see it with a neighbor buddy and we were kinda laughing about it while waiting for our ride and on the way home. I think it was the impact of the large theater screen. If I'd seen it on TV, it might not have scared me as much.

Now, in my waning years, I look back on it and have to laugh. Such is life.

Muvphreek (Trivia 4 Fun 8-10PM Eastern Sat & Sun Yahoo Pyramids Har-wer game room TONs-O-FREE fun!)

[–] donofthedial 15 years ago

Me, too.

See my post!

[–] jimbo-38 15 years ago

Ha ha. I saw it with a buddy when I was about 9 or 10 at the movies. It was so funny because my friend ran out of the theater when the melting scene started. I mean, he didn't even tell me he was going. I just looked over to where he was sitting just a few seconds earlier and he was gone. I kidded him about it for years. I gotta admit it, though, it was a pretty graphic scene.

[–] donofthedial 15 years ago

hahahahaha.....maybe that was where my sister began screaming!

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"If you ever work in an office, look out for the fat cows."

[–] tomtac 14 years ago

By "melting scene", do you mean when a sailor was attacked by what look like electric fields? Or when the alien was shot in the eye?

I was not too scared, as a kid, by the real menace ... invading spaceships that healed when you damaged them ... though that did worry me a little.

What did (and still does) haunt my subconscious was suddenly getting burned by a magnetic field like that. Or being just a tiny bit too slow getting through that iris door ... we always assumed the sailor was being cut into two. (When Commander Holloway almost got his foot stuck in the door, we were on the edge of our seats, figuring it could have been cut off.)

Storytelling at its 1950's best ... cheesy, but we didn't know better, and I guess the directors didn't know better either.

[–] youroldpaljim 15 years ago

I first saw it on TV in the early sixties on "Super Adventure Theater" WOR TV CH 9 . This film must have been quickly sold to TV after its first run .

[–] nospar122 15 years ago

I saw it in the theater as a kid too and was scared out of my mind. The other night, almost 5 decades later, I watched it on DVD. Boy was I weak as a kid. Just the worst movie ever, makes "Plan 9 From Outer Space" look like Oscar material. Nobel Prize for oceanography, indeed! And those special efx, done with $2 Aurora plastic submarine models. The real predecessor to "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" was - duh - "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea." Funny memories, though.

[–] muvphreek 15 years ago

I know what you mean about the crappy f/x. I was so impressed (and scared!) by them back then and I now see them for how cheap and shoddy they really were.

Its a funny thing, though. I still have dreams that seem to me to be like movie scripts. I take train trips, have dialogue with good-looking women, solve intricate problems while creating even more intricate ones! :) and generally do the kind of thing you might see in a G or PG rated movie. Only very rarely do I have one of those scary ones where I'm running for my life or I'm in some other kind of peril like you might find in a PG-13 or R movie. Every so often, an R deteriorates (or should that be 'accelerates'? I'm never sure...) into an X, but alas (or should that be a lack?) as the years go by, those come even fewer and much farther between.

It all gives me cause to wonder: Is my subconscious saying, "Whoa! Too many movies!" or is it saying, "I oughta be in pictures?" I may never know.

Muvphreek, True Baby Boomer and Child of the Fifties.

[–] pylgrym 11 years ago

Just saw this for the very first tim on TCM and rather enjoyed it, as I preTENded I was nine!
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YE must be born again

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

I first saw it on TV in the early sixties on "Super Adventure Theater" WOR TV CH 9 . This film must have been quickly sold to TV after its first run .

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Its a 1960 film, and I think it made its "Los Angeles TV debut" in 1962, on a Saturday night local horror movie franchise called "Chiller" (so as not to be confused with either "Boris Karloff's Thriller" or "Thriller Theater."

Here was the childhood issue for me:

The "Chiller" package (on local channel KTTV-11) was advertised with full page ads for its first two movies in the package: "The Giant Behemoth" on the first Saturday; and "House on Haunted Hill" on the second Saturday. The poster with a big dinosaur on the rampage in the first and Vincent Price holding a severed head in the second had me all desperate to SEE these movies but...I never got to. Its not so much that my parents didn't want me watching horror at that age; but we only had one TV and they wanted to watch something else on Saturday nights.

So my only outlet(usually) was going over to friend's house on Sunday, sitting in a tree house with him , and getting HIS report on The Giant Behemoth("Its got radiation breath and it melts people's faces!") and "House on Haunted Hill("The head is CHOPPED OFF!")...his reports on these movies actually made them sound worse than they really were.

"Chiller" eventually reached The Atomic Submarine and my treehouse friend reported on the horrors of the face melting scene and the eyeball getting shot.

"Chiller" ran for at least a year with these movies and occasionally, if the folks went out for the night, they gave clearance to watch the "Chiller" movie. I recall seeing "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" and "Attack of the Crab Monsters" and finally feeling "at one" with my treehouse friend.

Those were the days.

When we finally got two TVs in the house I caught up with all these horror movies and, well, they were kind of funny. But not always. Some of them seemed scary and effective.