For his first command in the Pacific war a by-the-book officer is ordered to take his submarine on a reconnaissance mission to locate a fleet of Japanese fighting ships the Allies have lost track of. At first, the rest of the crew resent his distant manner and the way he keeps avoiding taking on the Japs.
Reviews
dumb dialogue, lousy acting, silly story, overly dramatic background music. It ends up being a satire or caricature of all the good submarine movies even though they were being serious when they made it. It uses every cliché of a submarine movie, crew members going nuts, sneaking thru minefields, torpedoes that miss, the captain following orders in conflict with the crew, getting depth charged, having to make repairs while the enemy is around. It's not a crew I would want to go to sea with, untrained, undisciplined. The main plot is implausible. I could see a movie of this quality coming out 20 years earlier when they cranked out propaganda movies for the war. The character development needs a little work. I'm not surprised the actors are unfamiliar to anybody.
Submarine Seahawk is one of those films that you or I could put together with some stock footage and a knowledge of all the clichés involved in making a submarine motion picture.The U.S.S. Seahawk has a mission and it looks like a suicide one. Under new skipper John Bentley, they're to go into a secret Japanese base and report when the task force is being refitted. Then the Americans are to pull their own Pearl Harbor.For reasons only the writers know, the purpose of the mission is kept secret from the crew. Why, God only knows, because where's everybody going to go and tell once they're at sea. So the crew is grumbling why they're going out of the way to avoid engaging the enemy. John Bentley, Brett Halsey and the rest of the no name cast deserve some kind of medal for wading through this tripe and delivering some kind of decent performances. All the clichés involving submarine films are alive and thriving in Submarine Seahawk.Will they come home from the mission? Watch the film if you dare and care.
When one Lieutenant Commander Paul Turner (John Bentley) unexpectedly gets assigned the lead of the Submarine Seahawk for an important undercover mission (to find out where missing Japanese warships are being hidden), the crew becomes more and more anxious as Turner again and again refuses to fire on enemy ships while taking them further and further into dangerous enemy territory.This is decent enough entertainment for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon if one is in the mood for a submarine war adventure tale. A couple of familiar faces in the cast doesn't hurt any either nor does some of the early lighter scenes which help us to identify more with the crew.
The story isn't much, but the miniature footage is pretty good for an AIP quickie and the stock footage is quite well integrated for once. It won't set your world alight but it's certainly better than some of the other AIP war films (Paratroop Command, Tank Batallion, etc.)