- Director: Virgil W. Vogel
- Writer: László Görög
- Stars: John Agar, Cynthia Patrick, Hugh Beaumont
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 17 Minutes
Synopsis
We begin with a lecture from a professor who explains that most of the Earth has been explored, and we know a bit about space, but what’s under the surface of the Earth. And something rambly about Gilgamesh. He asks, could there be something under the Earth? He shows us a really bad drawing showing the interior spheres of the Earth. It’s all very scientific, so there must be life within the Earth. Credits roll.
We open in a desert in Asia. They find a stone tablet with writing on it. Dr. Bentley translates it, but then there’s an earthquake and the tablet is broken. A boy brings them a relic he found high up on the mountain, and they all go looking for more. Cue the mountain-climbing montage.
There’s an avalanche, and they find the arm from a statue that must have come from higher up the mountain. They find the ruins of a Sumerian temple. They don’t see any other city building, just the temple. A man falls through a hole above a deep chasm. They all decide to explore down in that hole next. It gets warmer and warmer as they descends. They find the body of the man who fell. Another man falls to his death, and he causes a cave-in, which traps the other three men. They follow the tunnel, and soon find light.
There’s a whole underground city inside a huge cavern. It’s lit by chemicals in the rocks. They take a nap, but some kind of monster with claws digs up through the dirt behind them. The three men are kidnapped by the creatures and pulled through the soil.
They wake up in a cavern-jail with several strange skeletons. Some strange men come in and lead them out. It turns out there’s a whole city there, and all the people speak English. The high priest interrogates the men. All the pasty, white-faced Sumarians speaking English while surrounded by Egyptian symbology doesn’t seem to phase the three explorers at all. The priest says they can’t stay. “You will die in the fire of Ishtar!”
The soldiers can’t tolerate bright flashlight beams, so the surface-men run away. They go back into the tunnels and descend further. They find a bunch of the mole-monster-things being whipped by the pasty humans; they are some kind of slave race. They run away, but Lafarge is killed by one of the mole men.
Bentley and Bellamin continue on and end up right in the same place. The priest follows them and asks them back; the flashlights convinced the king that the two men are gods. They go back and they all have dinner. The king gives Bentley a woman slave. Who is a very attractive and normal-complexioned blonde.
Bentley tells Adele, the slave girl, about wanting to get back to “his world,” as the high priest listens from the shadows. The priest knows the flashlight doesn’t mean the men are gods. He wants their “magic cylinder.”
Meanwhile Bentley and Bellamin keep looking for a way out. They interrupt a slave mole-man being beaten, and the mole man runs off and kills a guard. The Sumerians want the two men to use their flashlight to cow the slaves. They rescue a few more abused slaves, and then their batteries die.
After a completely gratuitous dancing scene, the priest opens a door, and three women sacrifice themselves to Ishtar by walking into a bright light. Later, men go inside that room and bring out the charred, burnt bodies of the three dead girls.
Meanwhile, the king finds the body of Lafarge, proving that the surface dwellers aren’t gods at all. They drug their food, and the two men are once again taken prisoner and prepared to cook them in the light of Ishtar. The priest gets his hands on the flashlight after all.
Meanwhile, Adele goes back to the slave pits and rouses the mole men to revolt. The priest tries to use the flashlight against the mole men, but it doesn’t work; the king, priest, and most of the wimpiest guards ever are killed. Adele gets the mole men to open up the big door to the bright light; Adele is fine with it, she goes right in. Turns out it’s just sunlight, which was a lethal as a furnace to the pasty folks after generations of being underground. Except for Adele who is one of the occasional flukes who are born with normal pigment (don’t overthink this movie too much).
They climb the walls up through a hole in the ground and they’re back outside again. Suddenly, there’s another earthquake, and Adele is killed.
Commentary
There is a lot of stock footage of snowy mountain scenes and nature walks. It looks good, but not-so-exciting for a modern viewer. Then the descent in the mountain is a long rock-climbing scene that’s also pretty boring. This might have interested kids who hadn’t seen much of the world in the 50s, but it bored me to tears.
The story here is a really simplistic, and then they stretched out with stock footage and wandering-through-the-tunnels filler. This was quite boring and far too long overall.
Supposedly, the original ending had Adele and Bentley go off together in a happy ending, but they changed it because they didn’t want to show an interracial couple. Adele looked to be every bit as Caucasian as Bently, but she was supposed to be Sumerian.