Editorials
Which Underwater Horror Film Won the B-Movie Sea Monster Wars of 1989?!
If you just got back from seeing Underwater and you were wondering why Hollywood doesn’t make a lot of sea monster movies, well, once upon a time they did. You need only look back to the year 1989; that’s the year when Hollywood made ALL OF THEM.
James Cameron was all set to release his blockbuster visual effects spectacular The Abyss in the summer of ’89, and it was such a huge production that a bunch of other filmmakers had time to churn out their own undersea creature features to siphon off Cameron’s seemingly inevitable success. Some of them even beat The Abyss to the box office!
The irony, of course, is that although there are at least five films which (arguably) knocked off The Abyss and tried to capitalize on its seemingly surefire success, Cameron’s film made money but it wasn’t a particularly big blockbuster. The Abyss didn’t even open at #1 at the box office (Ron Howard’s ensemble comedy Parenthood, already in its second weekend, was a bigger draw) and it wound up only the 18th highest grossing film domestically.
So instead of a brand new sea monster movie zeitgeist, we wound up with a whole bunch of underwater horror movies that, apparently, nobody asked for. Two of the five films that competed in The B-Movie Sea Monster Wars are still reasonably well-remembered today, if only by hardcore monster movie fans, but quite a few have been relegated to the footnote pile of history… until now.
I sat down with all five of the films that are considered, for obvious reasons, knockoffs of The Abyss. In one day. I almost didn’t survive. Let’s see which film really won The B-Movie Sea Monster Wars after all!
DeepStar Six (1989)
The first sea monster movie of 1989 came out in January, opposite the Christian Slater skateboarding vengeance movie Gleaming the Cube. It was hardly an auspicious date but DeepStar Six is a relatively strong horror movie. Directed by Friday the 13th’s Sean Cunningham, with a creepy score by the legendary Harry Manfredini, it’s the story – like a lot of the other films in The B-Movie Sea Monster Wars – of the blue collar crew of an underwater space station, whose lives are threatened by giant creatures and broken equipment.
DeepStar Six isn’t a particularly complex feature. Everyone on the station is trying to do their jobs but Miguel Ferrer – playing that guy at the office who’s only got a couple of days left before their contract is up and has already completely mentally checked out – keeps screwing up every damn thing imaginable. At one point he detonates a whole bunch of nuclear warheads just because he couldn’t be bothered to interpret the operations manual correctly. The Marx Brothers would have been more responsible team players.
Unfortunately, even though his character is criminally incompetent, and even though the movie relies almost entirely on his subpar decision-making skills to keep the story going, the rest of DeepStar Six’s cast is almost uniformly forgettable. The film’s monster, a giant mutant crustacean made via practical puppetry, is the only major selling point. It’s astoundingly cool whenever that beast is on camera – especially during a major set piece where half a human body is hanging from a hook and zipping across the ceiling like the rubber skeleton in a William Castle movie – but there’s just not quite enough of it.
The Verdict: DeepStar Six stays afloat… barely.
The Evil Below (1989)
There are worse films than The Evil Below, and that’s a tragedy. Sloughed off onto the straight to video market during the summer of 1989 was this cheap and ineffectual deep sea diving “thriller,” about a womanizing captain and a lady on the hunt for sunken treasure. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of unscrupulous cads are trying to steal their prize, and to top it all off the damned wreckage is haunted.
It may not sound like the worst idea for a movie, but The Evil Below does little to prove otherwise. Slow to the point of plodding, with tedious exposition stretching out the monotonous running time, the film relies on the chemistry of its stars to keep the audience’s attention. But the film’s leads, Wayne Crawford and June Chadwick, apparently flunked chemistry. By the time the Evil Below reveals that the “evil” in the title is actually the devil, kinda, and he shows up in a cheesy Dracula cape, all but the most stalwart and caffeinated audience members will have long since fallen asleep.
The Verdict: The Evil Below should have walked the plank.
Leviathan (1989)
The highest profile film in The B-Movie Sea Monster Wars – aside from The Abyss, of course – was George P. Cosmatos’s Leviathan. Peter Weller, Ernie Hudson, Hector Elizondo, Richard Crenna, Daniel Stern and Amanda Pays (an ensemble cast that’s still impressive today) star as… say it with me… the blue collar crew of an underwater space station, whose lives are threatened by giant creatures and broken equipment.
Leviathan is a damned good-looking production, with giant, genuinely impressive sets and gruesome practical monsters. The film follows the monster movie formula of the time very closely – so much so that it hardly has an original idea of its own – but it knows how to mix and match all the best stuff. Cosmatos’s film plays like Alien, if it was underwater, and if the alien was the alien from John Carpenter’s The Thing. Everyone gets infected by a strange and deadly mutagen, and everyone’s body warps to obscene and often disgusting shapes. And if that’s not a selling point, what is?
The Verdict: Even if you subtract points for its lack of originality, Leviathan is an ambitious and satisfying b-movie monster flick, and a minor horror classic in its own right.
Lords of the Deep (1989)
Roger Corman, who helped give James Cameron his start in the industry, was not above ripping his former acolytes off. The producer’s ultra-low-budget Lords of the Deep – the only film directed by producer Mary Ann Fisher – has a lot more in common with The Abyss than most of the other films in The B-Movie Sea Monster Wars. It’s about – you guessed it – the blue collar crew of an underwater space station, whose lives are threatened by giant creatures and broken equipment. But instead of fighting evil mutants it’s about a race of highly evolved aliens who want to save the crew from disaster, which is more in-keeping with Cameron’s complex vision of alien life than the chest-ripping creatures from DeepStar Six or Leviathan.
Unfortunately, absolutely nothing about Lords of the Deep can back up its lofty storytelling ideas. The production design is cheap and unconvincing, the cast can’t make any of the sci-fi inanity sound plausible (like the part where you smoosh your hand into psychotropic jelly and have a 2001: A Space Odyssey headtrip), and the visual effects are genuinely laughable. There’s a reason Lords of the Deep was featured on the most recent season of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
The Verdict: Lords of the Deep is so incompetent it’s almost charming. Almost.
The Rift (1990)
Technically speaking Juan Piquer Simón’s The Rift (a.k.a. Endless Descent) came out one year after The B-Movie Sea Monster Wars, like a heroic cavalry charge that arrived long after everyone else was dead. But it didn’t miss the cut off by much and it’s hardly the worst film to get lost in the short-lived zeitgeist’s wake.
The Rift stars R. Lee Ermey as the captain of an underwater vessel investigating the disappearance of another underwater vessel, and along the way, his crew runs afoul of a secret project to create deadly monsters. Jack Scalia and Ray Wise round out the mostly unremarkable ensemble, and the sets are so cheap they look like someone just added a radar machine to an accountant’s office and put blue gels on all the lights.
But The Rift isn’t a complete wash. Almost all of the film’s budget seems to have been dedicated to the practical monster and makeup effects, which have a lot of variety and lead to a series of grotesque set pieces. One of the creatures is as strikingly Lovecraftian as anything you’re likely to see in any other movie.
The Verdict: If you’re a creature feature fan, it’s worth wading through the cheapness and mediocrity of The Rift to get to its icky highlights.
And Your Winner… LEVIATHAN!
Over 30 years later hardly anyone cares what b-movie monster movie made slightly more or less than the others. All that matters is how well the movie holds up, and Leviathan holds up as well or better than most other 1980s creature features. Inventive effects, a stellar cast and grand production design more than compensate for a plot that borrows unapologetically from other horror classics. It’s a great watch.
Of the other films, DeepStar Six is a solidly above-average monster flick, and well worth a watch for even casual horror fans. The Rift is for hardcore creature feature fans only, with a limp storyline and forgettable characters but enough cool monster effects to make practical effects fans happy. But Lords of the Deep is a total snore unless you’re watching the MST3K version, and The Evil Below should have stayed there.
It’s not too late, of course, for the other studios to crank out a half dozen knockoffs of Underwater before the end of 2020. Will they make it in time? Will there be another round of The B-Movie Sea Monster Wars?
No, probably not. But we can always hope.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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