Well I thought this was going to be really cheesy but I was pleasantly surprised. The initial idea is fun - a cruise liner sinks to the bottom of the sea and 40 years later a salvage crew discovers it - plus a whole community of people who have somehow managed to stay alive inside it! The beginning of the story is the best, when a diver catches a glimpse of a girl's face through a grimy porthole, followed by the first divers surfacing inside the shipwreck. The drawbacks are mainly the impossibility of the people actually surviving at all - the explanations for how they have been breathing, eating and so on for 40 years trapped underwater really fell flat for me, no spoilers here about that as I couldn't actually understand that part at all! The film sags a little after the surface people are inside the ship, but picks up quite well as we learn more about some quite sinister rules of the "society" down below, however there is a really, REALLY pointless sub-plot about a top secret document that could have been totally cut out of the whole plot with no ill-effects at all. The surface people even say that the document must be retrieved and then destroyed, which is ridiculous because it's already at the bottom of the sea! The movie comes to quite a dramatic close, with an almost ridiculously drawn out struggle for survival by the main characters right at the end. The acting is mostly good, well it's got Christopher Lee after all, and he's never let a film down that I have seen.Effects are fairly good, lots of real ship and diving hardware on view, and the sunken ship exterior looks reasonably ominous. So it's 3 hours of fun (I watched the full version), and I wonder why there has not been a DVD rediscovery of it, like there was with Salem's Lot, which also saw the light of day in a truncated version before being released in full. Sadly the only commercial release of Goliath Awaits was a feature length re-edit, which is a shame, as it's really not bad at all.

I just finishing watching Goliath Awaits that I ordered from my library. I remembered it vaguely from years ago and wanted to watch it with my son. Anyway, the movie was less than 2 hours running time and I thought it was much longer when I first saw it. The back of the VHS box states that the Goliath "emtombs a Nazi file whose secrets could destroy the free world forever." The divers were supposedly on a covert mission to retrieve the demonic document. There was nothing even spoken about retrieving this document. Also, the box says that the "bestial ship's insatiable boiler feeds on human blood." That would make this a horror movie and there was also nothing revealed in the movie about this. I can't remember the details when I watched this years ago on TV...but could the back of this box actually be true? Maybe the 3 hour movie revealed more details??Just wondering if anyone knows anything about this.

Hi, Everyone,I worked on this movie at The Queen Mary (ship) in Long Beach in May of 1981. The crew and cast were fun to be with. I was an extra who was supposed to be a passenger on the Goliath down at the bottom of the ocean. We were all still alive years after the ship sank.A group of us were taught the dances of the 1920s (Lambeth Walk, Charleston). We worked in the cargo hold of the Queen Mary for some of our scenes. There were good guys and bad guys. Frank Gorshin and Christopher Lee were the villains. Christopher Lee was the Captain who kept the people alive and wanted to stay underwater when the rescuers arrived.John Carradine was a very pleasant man to work with in his scenes. He had arthritis but he managed to negotiate the stairway that led down into the hold of the ship. Mark Harmon was the hero who arrives to rescue the passengers.This movie was originally shown over a two night period on TV. It later was packaged as a VHS movie with some scenes edited out, but the short version seems the better and more fast paced of the two.There is one scene where the music does not match the dancing in the background. Watch for dancers moving at the wrong tempo. The scene was rehearsed at one speed (No music actually is played. The dancers are given a tempo and they dance without music while the dialog is being recorded. The music is inserted later.)and different music was put in for some reason.I liked the movie but it was not great. It was an interesting idea that will hold your attention for a couple of hours. If you like ship movies, try "Sea Chase" with John Wayne and Lana Turner or "Assault on a Queen" with Frank Sinatra.Tom Willett

An ocean liner goes down during WWII and a number of passengers survive and establish a civilization under the sea in the wreck. The film starts out good but then begins to wither. Too many little subplots are injected into the story, which sink it. (No pun intended) It begins to take on a Voyage to the Bottom of The Sea TV series episode type plot and the chilling Twilight Zone potential of the picture is lost. Christopher Lee does a superb job as the ship captain and is the film only really interesting character. A man who has gone from captain of the ship to absolute God in his underwater kingdom. The other characters particularly the Navy personnel who discover the wreck are weak to say the least. John Carradine co-stars as a silent film star who was aboard the liner when it went down and is now revered by the younger generation as one of the `Elders' Frank Gorshin is also aboard as the captains sinister law enforcer.