Fantastic Voyage/Voyage to Bottom of the Sea [DVD]

Irwin Allen's visually impressive but scientifically silly Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea updates 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as the world's most advanced experimental submarine manoeuvres under the North Pole while the Van Allen radiation belt catches fire, giving the concept "global warming" an entirely new dimension. As the Earth broils in temperatures approaching 170 degrees F, Walter Pidgeon's maniacally driven Admiral Nelson hijacks the Seaview sub and plays tag with the world's combined naval forces on a race to the South Pacific, where he plans to extinguish the interstellar fire with a well-placed nuclear missile. But first he has to fight a mutinous crew, an alarmingly effective saboteur, not one but two giant squid attacks and a host of design flaws that nearly cripple the mission (note to Nelson: think backup generators). Barbara Eden shimmies to Frankie Avalon's trumpet solos in the most form-fitting naval uniform you've ever seen; fish-loving Peter Lorre plays in the shark tank; gloomy religious fanatic Michael Ansara preaches Armageddon; and Joan Fontaine looks very uncomfortable playing an armchair psychoanalyst. It's all pretty absurd, but Allen pumps it up with larger-than-life spectacle and lovely miniature work.

Fantastic Voyage is the original psychedelic inner-space adventure. When a brilliant scientist falls into a coma with an inoperable blood clot in the brain, a surgical team embarks on a top-secret journey to the centre of the mind in a high-tech military submarine shrunk to microbial dimensions. Stephen Boyd stars as a colourless commander sent to keep an eye on things (though his eyes stay mostly on shapely medical assistant Raquel Welch), while Donald Pleasence is suitably twitchy as the claustrophobic medical consultant. The science is shaky at best, but the imaginative spectacle is marvellous: scuba-diving surgeons battle white blood cells, tap the lungs to replenish the oxygen supply and shoot the aorta like daredevil surfers. The film took home a well-deserved Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Director Richard Fleischer, who had previously turned Disney's 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea into one of the most riveting submarine adventures of all time, creates a picture so taut with cold-war tensions and cloak-and-dagger secrecy that niggling scientific contradictions (such as, how do miniaturised humans breathe full-sized air molecules?) seem moot. --Sean Axmaker

• Fantastic Voyage theatrical trailer
  
• Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea theatrical trailer
  
• Scene access
  
• Interactive menus

DVD Technical Information:

• Language: English 4.0, English 2.0 surround
  
• Subtitles: Croatian (on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea only), Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Portugese, Swedish, Turkish, English for the hearing impaired
  
• Widescreen version 16:9
  
• Video Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
  
• Region Code: 2
  
• PAL
  
• Running Time:
  Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea - 100 minutes
  Fantastic Voyage - 96 minutes
  
• Disc Format: Dual layer single sided disc DVD9

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea:
A routine scientific expedition to the North Pole turns into a race to save all mankind when a radiation belt in space causes a fiery inferno on Earth. Admiral Nelson (Walter Pidgeon) and the crew of the atomic submarine Seaview battle saboteurs, giant sea creatures and attacks by enemy submarines as they race to prevent global catastrophe. Renowned disaster film producer Irwin Allen produces and directs an all-star cast including Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, Peter Lorre and Frankie Avalon. The stunning visual effects and breathtaking underwater photography make this one of the most respected sci-fi adventure classics of all time.

Fantastic Voyage
This science fiction "inner space" thriller, one of the most amazing ever conceived, follows a crew of medical scientists (Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Edmond O’Brien, Donald Pleasance, Arthur O’Connell, William Redfield, Arthur Hennedy) on an incredible submarine journey through the human body and into the brain to perform a delicate repair operation. The team must combat the elements of the living body as well as a saboteur in their midst. But first they have to be miniaturised to microbe size for their fantastic adventure.