BONUS! Watch a Roger Corman movie to celebrate his 100th birthday!
As mentioned back when I covered Submersion of Japan, Roger Corman bought the rights as part of New World Pictures and made a remix where he cut out lots of footage, added new sequences directed by Andrew Meyer (Night of the Cobra Woman) and gave Lorne Greene the job of being Raymond Burr here, acting as an ambassador at the United Nations. Plus, American audiences got more Western actors, including Rhonda Leigh Hopkins (Summer School Teachers), John Fujioka (Shinyuki from American Ninja), Marvin Miller (who was a narrator in several movies), Susan Sennett (Candy from The Candy Snatchers), Ralph James (Sixpack Annie), Phil Roth, Cliff Pellow and Joe Dante.
Now called Tidal Wave, it came out in May of 1975, while New World also released an uncut subtitled version called Submersion of Japan in America, but it didn’t do all that well. Perhaps audiences had disaster fatigue. Even with the added insert shots, this English-dubbed version was cut down to only 82 minutes, as it had none of the plot elements of the Japanese movie.
Here’s a recap of the U.S. scenes on YouTube.
Roger Ebert wrote, ” It is purely and simply a wretched failure, a feeble attempt to paste together inept special effects (filmed in Japan) and Lorne Greene (filmed in America to his everlasting regret, I’ll bet).”
This line may be one of the best he’d ever written: “The movie never ends, but if you wait long enough it gets to a point where it’s over.”
You can download an incredible HD reconstruction of the American cut here.
