Fathom (1967)

My Christmas present to all of you this year will be to impart upon you another glorious review of another mediocre Raquel Welch film.  It's been my experience over the last year and a half that those of you on the inter-web browsing for movie reviews are hooked on Raquel Welch, why else would my review of 100 Rifles and Hannie Caulder be two of my most viewed entries?  So without further ado, the following is my review of Fathom, a film jammed packed with Raquel Welch and still not worth watching.

Raquel Welch is Fathom Harvill a top USA Team skydiver in Spain on a team competition.  She's approached by a Colonel and flight lieutenant of a secret government agency known as HADES.  They want to recruit Fathom for a top secret mission, to help them recover an item known as a fire dragon that has some control over a recently recovered atomic bomb.  Fathom's skydiving talents are needed to infiltrate the residence of Peter Merriwether who could have important information as to it's whereabouts.  But as Fathom quickly discovers everything she's been told is a lie and she's been thrown in the middle of an ongoing chase she knows nothing about and doesn't know who to trust.

I must say I'm not having the best of luck choosing good Raquel Welch films, if anyone wants to point me in the right direction please do because so far I have been sorely unimpressed with everything I have seen except for Hannie Caulder which is the one film I would recommend checking out, if you can find it!  It's really no secret why Raquel Welch was so popular during her heyday.  I liken her to Eva Mendez, drop dead gorgeous but really incapable of acting her way out of a paper bag.  If you have a decent supporting cast, interesting story and a good execution of it all, the talent of your lead head turner really isn't that important, but for Fathom the support isn't there and Raquel's lovely figure cannot save this film.

It appears the late 1960's went through a fad with a slew of bad comedy caper films, Fathom is one of those, in fact I'm currently making my way through another comedy caper also featuring Rachel Welch entitled The Biggest Bundle of Them All, which was released a year after Fathom.  So far it's taken me three separate viewings and I've still haven't finished it!  But back to the film at hand.  I had semi high hopes for Fathom, I wasn't expecting something groundbreaking, but was hoping at least for something entertaining, but other than Raquel's outer beauty I cannot sing much praises for this film.

With a 99 minute run-time you'd think it would be fairly difficult to bore a viewer, especially with Raquel on screen, but that's the main problem with this film, its boring.  The characters aren't interesting, I can't even "fathom" (you knew that was coming) Raquel Welch as a skydiver, and the film's comedy only seems to camp up an already horrible script.  Fathom manages to somewhat salvage itself in the last 30 minutes with a slew of twists and turns that don't make the film better but only manage to mix up the bland script and regain a bit of my interest, but for most people I think it's a little to late.  In the end, Fathom is only for the Raquel fanatics, everyone else can go back to pretending this film never existed, that is if you even knew it did in the first place.

5/10