This is a very rare example of a movie I loved as a kid that utterly left me flat a mere thirty years later. I like space, I like submarines, a movie about a submarine that hunts flying saucers should be gold, right? It’s not. It just totally did nothing for me. The utter lack of excitement is palpable. Even scenes that I remember liking quite a bit – such as when a beatnik and a naval officer get in an argument about uniforms (“These uniforms that your kind hate – these are my work clothes.

There are all kinds of bad movies. There’s the bad ones that are so bad as to be simply unwatchable - pretty much anything by Andy Warhol, for instance - and then there’s the bad ones of no particular distinction that are simply forgotten - “Starship Invasions” staring Robert Vaughn comes to mind. There are movies that get the rep of being terrible, but actually aren’t that bad - “The Giant Gila Monster” is all kinds of dumb, for instance, but there’s an earnest sweetness to it people overlook.