Dimension 5 was written by Arthur C. Pierce. He also wrote The Human Duplicators, which is a sillier movie than this one but only by a very narrow margin. Most of the cast are strangers to MST3K (although a surprising number of them appeared on Star Trek), but we do get to see Kam Tong and Robert Ito from Women of the Prehistoric Planet. That is also a sillier movie than this one, but again, only slightly. Above and beyond that, there are just a million tiny things in Dimension 5 that scream MST3K, and I'm sure the Brains would have had a ball with it.
Our Hero, who the movie wants us to consider the coolest guy in the world, is Justin Power. See? With a name like that, how could he not be amazing? He's a secret agent with a 'time converter', which is some kind of magic belt that looks like part of a circus acrobat's costume (there are plastic jewels on it) but actually allows the wearer to time travel and teleport. Power's current mission is to take on a Chinese terrorist organization, the Dragon, who are planning to explode an atomic bomb in Los Angeles. Along with the beautiful but perhaps not entirely trustworthy Kitty Tsu, he must track down the Dragon leader Big Buddha and foil his evil plot before Lex Luthor becomes the worth's wealthiest owner of seaside property.
The moment I knew this movie was destined for MST3K in some universe (even if it's sadly not ours) was when Power's boss at Espionage Inc arrives, walking with a cane. “Hello, Justin!” he says. “Hello, Cane!” Power replies. It was a weird, confused couple of moments before I realized that 'Caine' was the guy's name, and for the rest of the movie I kept giggling like a lunatic as I imagined Joel and Bots calling out Power's greetings to random inanimate objects. “Hello, Watch!” “Hello, Teapot!” “Hello, Obvious Concealed Bomb!”
I'm not making fun of the movie by calling the organization ‘Espionage Inc’, by the way. That's its actual name.
There are a hundred more moments that beg to be riffed. Consider the utterly baffling bit with a balancing spoon and a scientist who claims he's searcing for the anti-graviton. This feels like it should be setting up a plot point, but it's never mentioned again. A captured baddie is interrogated with a mind-reading torture device that's really just a salon hair dryer. Big Buddha's personal thug, Genghis, looks exactly like Tor Johnson. There's a scene in which Power calls his boss in the middle of the night just to mess with him, and multiple moments when his voice sounds exactly like Adam West. The Dragon apparently have a disintegrator ray and they never use it! If I were in charge of an evil organization with a fucking disintegrator ray, I wouldn't even bother with the stupid atom bomb!
The movie wants so badly to be about how cool Justin Power is. Its opening sequence plays like something you might see on a television screen within an episode of The Simpsons to suggest that a character is watching A Spy Movie. There's a car chase, and then Power kisses a girl before punching her and confiscating the gun she was about to pull out of her purse. He then leads some soldiers on a merry chase back and forth through a cave before being taken away by a very conspicuous helicopter. It all seems slightly desperate, like the movie is waving in our faces and yelling, “look! Our fearless Hero! Isn't he great? This is a spy movie!” Not to mention all the time spent implying that Power has bedded literally every woman he knows, from his female co-workers to the waitresses at his favourite restaurant.
The over-blown-ness of all this seems even more absurd when it's contrasted with Kitty Tsu's introduction. We first see her when she foils an assassination, with such skill that nobody even notices her doing it, even though they can tell somebody intervened. Unlike Power's introduction, Tsu's is also relevant to the plot – Power's opening serves only to be a James Bond wannabe and demonstrate the time converter. All that work put into telling us how cool he is, only for her to be six times cooler without getting a hair out of place.
In fact, the entire first half of the movie consists mostly of Tsu being smarter, more capable, and more on top of things than Power, to the point where I began to think it had to be intentional. Could it be, I wondered, that the film is deliberately making Power look like an idiot in order to parody macho spy movie cliches? Tsu is so far out of his league, both as a spy and a human being, that I really enjoyed watching her take him down peg by peg. She even turns out to have a backstory that's interwoven with the villains', giving her a personal stake in this story that Power just does not have. Surely, I thought, this all has to be on purpose. This is Kitty Tsu's movie, and Justin Power is her sidekick, not the other way around. Right?
Nope. In the final showdown with Big Buddha, Tsu has a monologue moment and is captured, and Power has to save her. Even with the motive given for her behaviour, I find it hard to believe she would be that stupid. I find it even harder to believe that in a crunch she would throw a gun to Power instead of shooting the bad guy herself. Then, in the closing scene, he continues the condescending 'lesson plan' he's been giving her the entire movie, and she responds by kissing him! All that time spent building her up as way more awesome than him was actually, I think, meant to show that she's worthy of retiring and raising his children. Fuck that. The end credits just left me pissed off that Tsu didn't ditch Power and go get her own movie franchise.
The end credits also contain the information that Ken Spalding played 'Negro Agent'.
Tsu is left in very much the same situation as Lisa Dornheimer from The Human Duplicators, in that she's an interesting character in an an interesting situation, well-placed to do something about it, and then... nothing. The viewer gets the idea that Arthur C. Pierce was quite good at coming up with female characters and quite bad at giving them a real role in the plot, preferring to lavish attention on his 'dynamic' male leads while not realizing that they're what's sucking the life out of the story. Human Duplicators would have been much better if Glenn Martin hadn't been the hero. Dimension 5 would have been better with Justin Power relegated to a supporting role.
The weirdest character moment in the movie, however, is at the very end. Power and Tsu have been captured by the Dragon and are about to be shipped to Hong Kong for torture and interrogation. The only thing that stops this is Big Buddha's masseuse. At a critical moment she just steps up and stabs her boss, I think because he'd earlier ordered the death of her boyfriend – I can't say for sure because the relationship is not set up at all. We never even met her until five minutes earlier. She provides the necessary distraction for Power and Tsu to escape, and then while Big Buddha is distracted by the ensuing fight, attacks him again and kills him. Then, as the audience sits there wondering what the hell just happened, the whole incident is rendered moot as Power and Tsu go back in time so that Espionage Inc. can stop any of this from happening in the first place. That was weird.
What else is going on in Dimension 5? Well, this is rather obviously a Yellow Peril movie. The plot to destroy Los Angeles is explicitly a communist one, carried out by agents who are posing as Americans. Restauranteur Kim Fong is Power's friend, but is helpless to do anything but watch when Dragon orders a hit on him. Nancy Ho claims she was born in California and has never even been to China, but she's a liar. Even Kitty Tsu, for all she's one of The Good Guys, has her own motives that are more to do with her native homeland than her adopted one. Despite the presence of token Agent Sato (significantly Japanese rather than Chinese), the theme seems to be that these people are not Americans, and cannot be trusted no matter what they say.
The Asian characters are furthermore a collection of stereotypes – cowards, schemers, dominant women, and sexless men. I think the film-makers may have been afraid that Big Buddha, an intimidating guy whom we see shirtless and being oiled up by a beautiful woman, would seem too sexual, so they put him in a wheelchair to imply that he's impotent. Sure, let's insult disabled people while we're here. And yet... this was in a time when Christopher Lee was still starring in Fu Manchu movies, so I guess I at least have to give them credit for casting almost all the Asian characters with Asian actors. The exception is Genghis, who (like Jang in Women of the Prehistoric Planet) is played by a Hawai'ian, Lee Kolima. I guess one could argue that the movie never explicitly says Genghis is supposed to be Chinese.
If you want a movie that makes for a good do-it-yourself MST3K episode, Dimension 5 is pretty much perfect. The list of things you can make fun of here is almost endless, but like the best of MST3K features, there's also a coherent story you can follow. Get some popcorn, some friends, and enough liquor to invent your own drinking game, and this one comes highly recommended.
