“You’re an inquisitive woman, aren’t you, Ethel?”

Drake’s rating: Considering 10,000 leagues is about 30,000 miles, this might be an exaggeration

Drake’s review: There’s something fishy going on in the waters off of Generic Beach, and it’s up to Dr. Scientist and Agent Brylcreem to find out just what.

Which seems a little anticlimactic, since in the opening minutes of The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues the viewer is treated to the sight of the movie’s threat, a ridiculous latex creature with laughably limited mobility wreaking its own brand of small-scale havoc in those briny depths. And that brief glimpse alone is enough to let us all know that this monster is going to find it remarkably difficult to be menacing to anyone capable of simply walking away at a brisk pace.

Still, the initial corpse found by Dr. Scientist is covered in radiation burns, which makes him think there might be more to this discovery than meets the eye. That line of thought brings him to Prof. Mustache, the local oceanographer, who seems skeptical of the good doctor’s idea that they might be dealing with a man-made monster. And I say “seems” because Prof. Mustache might know more than he’s letting on about the creature. And when I say “might,” I mean he definitely does. He has a laboratory, after all, which in one of these 1950s low-budget sci-fi/monster flicks automatically means he’s up to no good.

Now Agent Brylcreem has been a bit standoffish towards Dr. Scientist, but that ends when two more bodies wash up on the beach and the pair must work together, just like Quint and Brody. Or Laurel and Hardy. Or maybe Frankie and Annette. Deciding to take a dive themselves, the duo encounter the monster and manage to survive by virtue of being able to simply swim away from it. Suspense, thy name is not The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues.

But Dr. Scientist and Agent Brylcreem aren’t the only ones interested in the creature. It seems that, since it’s 1955, nebulous but foreign powers are involved as well, and those powers have sent Agent Obvious and Agent Seductress to the beach to get tans and to steal any sciencey-type information they can get their hands on. And to also hide in a bush and shoot Prof. Mustache’s secretary with a speargun, in the closest thing this movie’s had to an action sequence yet.

But a few minutes later an ocean-going freighter explodes thanks to inserted stock footage and, with five minutes of runtime left I’m wondering just where this flick is going.

Honestly, I should have just stayed curious. Instead I trudged through to the end, which involved Prof. Mustache going diving with a bomb, and then getting grabbed by the glacially slow monster and held in a relatively cozy hug until more explosive stock footage brought this one to a close.

A straight-up cheapie from American Releasing Corporation, the predecessor to American International Pictures, The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues exists simply because studio head James H. Nicholson needed another flick to pair with Day the World Ended on the drive-in circuit. And while it does benefit from some veteran actors who give the film a tiny bit of gravitas, The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues feels very much like an afterthought that was churned out just to fill a double bill.

Glacially slow and visually uninteresting, have no regrets if you let this one sit in your queue unwatched. It’s not bad enough to be quirky, but it is boring enough to send you off to dreamland when you should be writing a review.

Intermission!

• Lead actor Kent Taylor, a B-movie veteran, started his film career in the 1930’s, and was one of the visual influences when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created the character of Clark Kent.
• Director Dan Milner was a longtime film editor and, along with his brother, invested in the movie in order to get in the director’s chair. He later helmed From Hell It Came, another low-budget flick that featured a walking tree as the monster.
• There’s some supposition that said tree creature was the impetus for Stan Lee to create the character of Groot in 1960, but there’s also every chance that Lee simply drove by a gnarly looking tree one day and thought to himself, “Jack Kirby can make a monster out of that!”
• Yeah, I’m reaching for any tidbits of info about this one. Sorry, guys, there’s just not much here. Um… Helene Stanton, the pretty foreign agent, was originally an opera singer, so there’s that. She was also the mother to Drew Pinsky, who became famous himself as Dr. Drew. Huh. Well, you learn something new every day…