An insult to any veteran of WWII or any other military campaign, this lame-brained action flick is both preposterous and unintentionally amusing. When the Japanese sink a U.S. submarine of the coast of a Philippine island, a crack team of divers is sent in to destroy the remains, lest the enemy gets its hands on state of the art equipment located in the wreckage. Brady is the captain of a different sub whose mission is to transport the divers to the scene. He and Dante reservedly welcome the men on board. Hunter leads the team which consists of Avalon, Backus, Crosby, McCrea and Aleong (no reason is given for the exclusion of Don Rickles and Michael Nader!) These mismatched, unlikely buffoons take part in various painfully-unfunny misadventures while on the sub including Avalon pouring hot coffee into Backus' crotch! (Backus was light years away from co-starring with James Dean by now!) Avalon pastes his girlfriend's picture onto a torpedo and then sings to it (TWICE!) while color travelogue footage is shown with his black & white face superimposed on it and two contrasting women emote and gesture in turn. Gritty war drama... Later, the divers move ashore and are greeted by Filipino guerrillas including the producer's girlfriend Six, who was introduced to the world in this film (and forgotten by most of the world very soon after!) With the island teeming with enemy Japanese, it's up to Hunter to find a way to complete the job, even if it turns into a suicide mission. The film has a cheap, pasted-together look with stark and unimaginatively filmed scenes on the submarine set and the "Gilligan's Island"-esquire jungle set mixed with stock footage of battle scenes and water-logged seamen drowning. Hunter, looking handsome as usual, has many close-ups of his face just staring blankly as if he was photographed without being fed any lines. Brady plays the whole thing as if this is his own personal "Run Silent, Run Deep". McCrea takes part in a ridiculous underwater scene in which he holds his breath indefinitely and swims all over the ocean before finally someone thinks of the idea of "buddy-breathing". Six is unbelievable. She's shown flailing around on the fake, moss-covered ground while a huge, fluffy, Roseanne Roseannadanna wig straddles her head. Later, she's part of a diversionary tactic in which the Japanese would rather shoot at nude swimming women than at the U.S. officers who are picking them off from above!! Apart from a few campy, ludicrous moments, the film comes to life only once and briefly. Before heading out to battle, Hunter is awakened in the night by Six, who crawls on top of him and begins rubbing him down with special oils, ripping apart his shirt and forcing him to turn over onto his belly!! When it's all said and done, the movie isn't quite finished assaulting the senses. It saves it's biggest surprise for the finale as it unleashes the tackiest, most surreal end credits sequence ever filmed. Two curvy chicks in bikinis (which have nothing, by the way, to do with this film's prior content) cavort playfully, awkwardly and goofily on the beach while a narrator fervently hopes that the horrors of what happened on Bikini Island will be displaced by the new connotation for the word "bikini"!! That little tribute surely warmed the veterans' hearts who watched this all the way to the end. Both of them!!
Review of Operation Bikini
