Review of Deep Rising (1998) by Rebecca H — 23 Jun 2009

There's a moment early on in Deep Rising - a monster movie set aboard a stranded luxury ocean liner - that makes my imagination tingle. Hundreds of oblivious party guests are drinking and dancing, while slinky thief Trillian (Famke Janssen) sneaks outside to examine some loot. The sea is turbulent, the sky black, and the night is filled with horrible, mysterious noises. Are they animals? Why are they doing that? Shudder - my imagination gallops along, filling in the blanks, thanking Stephen Sommers for a (very) rare moment of restraint. The auteur behind Van Helsing normally wouldn't have bothered.

Alas, that's about it for teasing and suggestion. The rest of the film is a rather unforgiving assault on the viewer's patience, presenting them with about a hundred budget-saving scenes of unseen monsters advancing beneath water/carpet/walls, followed by another hundred full close-ups of the slobbery, CGI beasties themselves. Add to this the amount of envelope-pushing yuck on display, such as walls plastered in corpse gunge and half-digested, still-living bodies staggering about, and anyone with a weak stomach should probably steer clear. How, exactly, did this get a 15 rating? (Edit: Probably by virtue of the monsters and their victims, mid-chew, not looking remotely real.).

The only other thing on display, besides the slimy monsters, endlessly firing weaponry and explosions, is the supposedly sassy dialogue. Treat Williams tries his best initially as the world-weary Finnegan, inadvertantly leading a bunch of mercenary thieves to an empty cruise ship - but later in the film he just looks tired and bored. He struggles with such witty catchphrases as "Now what?", but at least all the really dire stuff, all the "Where the hell IS everybody?" / "This is not happening!" / "This s**t is really starting to freak me out, man!" dreck, goes to the monster-fodder extras. Kevin J. O'Connor is marginally more consistent as a grumpy mechanic, but even he stops making sense when the death of his beloved girlfriend fails to make a dent in his day.

And of course, this being Stephen Sommers, the sassy dialogue is always interrupted mid-flow by the special effect du jour. That's not a shock tactic, just as it isn't in Van Helsing or The Mummy films: it just makes it sound and look like the director is begrudged to include any dialogue at all, and wants to at every opportunity get back to gruesome mayhem.

It sounds like an absurd request, given that we're talking about a monster movie with the tagline "Full Scream Ahead!", but I think I would have preferred something more toned-down. Okay, just not seeing the monster doesn't count - Sommers mercilessly overuses the "It's under the carpet/in the walls!" schtick from Aliens, which makes sense as he's essentially nicked that film's structure - but maybe if the creatures could do something a little more mysterious than yanking people out of shot, always with an accompanying spray of bloodish splat, then maybe the audience's imaginations could step in more often.

Obviously that's not going to happen - Full Scream Ahead, everybody! - but I can't deny that when I get to that moment with Famke Janssen and the strange, noisy sea, I still want to see that film. I suppose the same goes for the cliffhanger ending - left jokingly for an obviously non-existant sequel - which is sufficiently tongue-in-cheek to make you wish the whole film was that way. My advice to Mr Sommers? Watch Tremors, and take notes.