Dimension 5 (1966)

A strange, little, genre confused film, 10 August 2017

Dimension 5 is a strange little movie that combines several different genres. At best, I'd call it harmless enough as it does provide some small degree of entertainment. At worst, I'd call it a mess of movie that attempts to mix sci-fi and romance elements into what is basically a spy movie. The results are underwhelming. The sci-fi is missing from 3/4 of the movie, the romance isn't very believable, and the spy parts are too easily solved or handled.

Dimension 5's plot is a difficult one to summarize. A group called Dragon plans to detonate a nuclear device in Los Angeles if the US doesn't draw down its forces in South East Asia. Agent Justin Power (Jeffrey Hunter) is put on the case. He has at his disposal a time travel belt. He uses knowledge from the future to effect events in the present. He is assigned a partner, Ki Ti Tsu (France Nuyen), from Hong Kong. She is familiar with Dragon. Together, they'll have to discover the mastermind behind Dragon, how Dragon intends on bringing the device into the US, and put a stop to the plan.

Here's a laundry list of issues and observations I took from Dimension 5:

- I recently wrote about the lack of on-screen chemistry in Thor: The Dark World. If it's possible, Hunter and Nuyen have even less spark. On a scale of 1 – 10, I'd rate their on-screen chemistry at about a zero.

- The build-up to the big reveal that Power's new partner is a woman was painful to watch. I'm not sure how many times Power's boss said something like "your associate" or "your partner" without once using a pronoun. Maybe a female agent was surprising in 1966, but I found the whole exercise tedious.

- The time shift belt is featured in the first 10 minutes of the film and is all but forgotten until the final 10 minutes. There are plenty of other instances where the belt would have helped our heroes. And, at one point, we are treated to some rather lengthy scientific mumbo- jumbo about the dangers of getting stuck in a time shift. But I'm not sure why all this time is wasted on foreshadowing that goes nowhere. That movie, where the characters are caught in a different time arc, might have been more interesting.

- Why is Harold Sakata in this movie? You hire a big bruiser like Sakata and then put him in a wheelchair. What were they thinking? Also, what was the deal with Sakata's dubbing? The dubbing was horribly obvious. The sound quality was completely different from anything else in the film. However, I will give Dimension 5 some credit for hiring actual Asians like Sakata, Nuyen, and a host of others to play Asian parts. A lot of studios and producers would have hired non-Asians and (as I call it) "yellow-faced" the parts. I appreciate the effort.

4/10