In June of 1968 Toho signed a deal with agent-producer Don Sharpe’s Ambassador Productions to make
Latitude Zero (Ido Zero Daisakusen), an all-English SF/fantasy based on a 1941 radio serial created by Ted Sherdeman. Sharpe, together with partners Sherdeman and Warren Lewis, had unsuccessfully pitched a TV version of the serial to US networks, but Toho, eager to expand into international markets, gave Latitude Zero a greenlight, while contributing half of the JPY360 million production costs.
This extravagant budget, by Toho standards, allowed the studio to hire three name Hollywood actors: Joseph Cotten, well-known in Japan for the often-revived noir classic The Third Man, Cesar Romero, whose career had been resurrected by his role as The Joker in the hit Batman TV show, and Richard Jaeckel, a veteran character actor who had recently starred in Fukasaku Kinji’s SF/horror The Green Slime (Ganma Daisan Go: Uchu Daisakusen, 1968).
The story is a genre mash-up of 20,000 Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Lost Horizon and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Three men exploring the ocean depths in a bathysphere – oceanographer Tashiro Ken (Takarada Akira), geologist Jules Masson (Okada Masumi) and photo-journalist Perry Lawton (Richard Jaeckel) – are rocked by the eruption of an underwater volcano.
Fortunately, a nearby futuristic submarine rescues them. The captain, Craig MacKenzie (Joseph Cotten), turns out to be the two-century-old founder of an undersea Shangri-la called Latitude Zero where no one ages, injuries are miraculously healed and diamonds are used in room planters.
Perry is initially skeptical (“Maybe we’ve been injected with something?”), but MacKenzie turns out to be a decent, if secretive, type, who uses the scientific discoveries of his paradise for the general surface-world good.
He has an implacable rival and enemy, however, in Malic (Cesar Romero), who commands another super-sub, the Black Shark.
Kidnapping Dr. Okada (Nakamura Tetsu), a Nobel Laureate physicist and MacKenzie ally, and his daughter Tsuruko (Nakayama Mari), Malic brings them to his craggy seaside lair and threatens to turn them into human-animal monsters if Okada doesn’t spill the beans about a new anti-radiation technology.
To show he means business, Malic operates on the sub’s luckless female captain (Kuroki Hikaru), trans-forming her into a gryphon – a legendary monster with the wings of an eagle and the body of a lion. Meanwhile, MacKenzie, Tashiro and the others are on their way to save Dr. Okada and Tsuruko from this dire fate, but first they have to surmount the deadly obstacles Malic has placed in their way.
Jaeckel plays it straight as the skeptical journo Perry, while Romero hams it up shamelessly as the mad scientist Malic.
Cotten is somewhere in between as MacKenzie: Urbane and genial in early scenes, Cotten looks vaguely ridiculous as the elderly leader of the rescue party, zooming up cliffs in a gold lamé suit with a tiny jet pack on his back or battling giant bats.
Veteran effects wizard Tsuburaya Eiji and his team created not only their usual eruptions and explosions, but also the sleek subs commanded by Cotten and Romero and an ultra-modern underwater world that still looks inviting, with or without the diamonds. Unfortunately, in a reflection of the severe budget cuts Toho forced on Tsuburaya, the film’s costumed-actor monsters look less chilling than cheesy.
Latitude Zero was to be Tsuburaya’s last collaboration with Honda: He died of a heart attack on January 25, 1970 at age 68. It also became a last hurrah for classic Toho SF, since his successors could not replicate the tokusatsu magic he and Honda had created together for nearly two decades.