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.