Search - It Came from Beneath the Sea on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Suitable for Children, Not For Children Movie Release: 1955 DVD Release: 05/06/2003 Format: DVD - Black and White,Enhanced Wide Screen Letterbox for 16x9 TV Audio Tracks: English Subtitles: English, French, Spanish, Thai SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 18 mins Studio: Columbia TriStar Members Wishing: 3 Genres: Science Fiction, Creature Film, Sci-Fi Horror See Also: It Came from Beneath the Sea, It Came from Beneath The Sea [Blu-ray]

It Came From Beneath the Sea was the first of several fruitful collaborations between producer Charles H. Schneer and special-effects wizard Ray Harryhausen. "It" is a giant, six-tentacled octopus, which is galvanized into action by an H-bomb test. Worse still, the monster is highly radioactive, rendering useless the normal means of defense against it. Scientists Donald Curtis and Faith Domergue team with atomic-submarine commander Kenneth Tobey to halt the creature's progress before it begins to attack major coastal cities. Alas, the monster manages to reach San Francisco, wreaking havoc on the Golden Gate Bridge, the Ferry Building, and Market Street before Tobey figures out a way to destroy it. The stop-motion animation utilized by Harryhausen in It Came From Beneath Sea is convincingly frightening, but before long he'd top this achievement with such superb projects as Earth vs. Flying Saucers and Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Kenneth Tobey - Pete Mathews
Faith Domergue - Lesley Joyce
Donald Curtis - John Carter
Ian Keith - Adm. Burns
Dean Maddox, Jr. - Adam Norman

Within the science fiction and fantasy genres,It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) was a very important film historically, although you'd hardly have known it from the way it was treated on videocassette and laserdisc. The movie marked the beginning of special effects genius Ray Harryhausen's 25-year partnership with producer Charles H. Schneer, and a 20-year relationship between the two filmmakers and Columbia Pictures. On videocassette and laserdisc, however, it looked fairly poor, suffering from a slightly soft image and indifferent sound. The producers of the DVD, by contrast, have gone to a fair amount of trouble to make this title look extraordinarily good. The transfer derives from what looks almost like camera negative material, with the dramatic and special-effects scenes alike emerging razor sharp in their detail; even the fades to black after certain segments go to a true black. The 79-minute film has been given an astonishingly generous 28 chapters. It also comes with the original trailer, those of subsequent Harryhausen movies (Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, 20 Million Miles to Earth), and the same Harryhausen featurettes that have shown up on the other Columbia/TriStar DVD releases: "The Harryhausen Chronicles," hosted by Leonard Nimoy, and "This Is Dynamation," the late-'50s showcase for his work. On the down side, the audio has been mastered at a very, very low level, the one compensation being that it is so clean that, by doubling the usual volume on one's monitor, the sound becomes reasonable, with the periodic explosions and sound effects pretty impressive. The letterboxed image is masked to the standard Hollywood non-anamorphic 1.85:1, which actually cuts off picture information at the top and bottom when compared with full-frame presentations of the movie; it does, however, tightly focus the action, and no scenes suffer over the masking. Special features -- which include access to English captions and French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Thai subtitles -- are accessible through a multi-layered range of selections. Along with the Harryhausen-related trailers, the trailer for Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind is also included, which might seem irrelevant except for the fact that Harryhausen was the closest thing that Hollywood had as a fantasy-film creator before Spielberg came along. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide