In 1989, all the cool movies were taking place under water. The most famous of these films was James Cameron’s The Abyss, but there was also a gaggle of much less memorable films, like Leviathan, Endless Descent, The Rift, and one that bares several striking similarities to Cameron’s film called DeepStar Six. In this movie, directed by Sean S. Cunningham who is most famous for gracing the world with Friday the Thirteenth, a group of submarine-driving roughnecks are contracted by the Navy to construct an underwater silo capable of launching long-range nuclear missiles. The rag-tag group includes B-movie regular Matt McCoy as James, Miguel Ferrer as a guy named Snyder, (you just know he’s going to be a bastard with a name like Snyder) and a ferociously hot Nia Peeples as Dr. Scarpelli. This crew works on the ocean floor in a scientific research station named, surprise surprise, DeepStar Six. While a pair of engineers are bombing out an undersea cave to construct their missile silo, their submarine/bulldozer is sunk by some kind of creature that the audience doesn’t get to see quite yet. Scarpelli, the resident marine biologist, says that the rock formation that originally sealed off the cave is millions of years old, so whatever came out of the cave is just as old. After losing a mini-sub, a small satellite base, and about half their crew, the leader of the project Dr. Gelder (Marius Weyers) decides to evacuate the station. They can’t leave without first securing their nuclear armament, so Snyder, who I assume is part of the military team in spite of the fact that he is never given a rank, follows the computer instructions for securing the cache by DETONATING MULTIPLE 100 MEGATON NUCLEAR DEVICES!
Anyone with at least half of a working brain would assume that blowing-up a bunch of nuclear bombs would cause a violent and potentially deadly underwater shock wave, and that’s exactly what happens. The DeepStar station is shaken about in Star Trek fashion and the base’s own nuclear reactor is damaged and will soon explode itself. While the team tries to repair the decompression chamber, without which the survivors will not be able to escape their underwater prison, the million-year-old monster follows James in through a hatch and the ensuing fight begins to flood the base. The creature is only ever described as an ancient arthropod, but to be more specific, looks like a giant sea scorpion (eurypterid). Although the monster does have a unique and interesting design, it is an obvious puppet as we only ever get to see the front half of it poking out of the water. It is not very animated, and I would guess that the prop was quite fragile as we rarely see it interact with the actors in any convincingly forceful or violent manner. Despite its best efforts, this film is not really worth watching. It has a lot of boring dialogue scenes that are compounded by a truly terrible script. The sea scorpion barely ever appears and there are only three onscreen kills by the monster, and only one of them is memorable. That one being the bloody bitten-in-half death of James in a deep sea diving suit, and the shock value of that is spoiled by the poster artwork. I recommend this one only if you’re patient and have some time to kill, or you really like prehistoric arthropods.
Comments
Post a Comment