Review of Leviathan (1989) by Chris A — 02 Jan 2015

I don't understand the shockingly low score. It's not amazing, but it's a pretty good creature feature.

The cast is quite good (though I wasn't sure if Peter Weller was phoning it in or just being Peter Weller) with Richard Crenna giving the best performance. The creature effects are fun and sometimes creepy and the movie moves along briskly and doesn't overstay its welcome.

It is, of course, cheesy at times. The last five minutes of the movie are so different in tone and so bad that it nearly kills everything that preceded it. It could have just ended when they surfaced, but no, we had to get sharks... then more monster... then our hero punching a woman? What?

This movie will unfairly be compared to The Thing and Alien... well, they're fair comparisons in plot, but not in quality. Just because this movie doesn't quite reach those levels in entertainment doesn't mean this movie should be completely dismissed. It's far better than many of the other ripoffs of those movies. If this were a race, Leviathan may be a distant third, but it's still third! That's still a medal!

If you're looking for a sci-fi horror film in the vein of Alien or The Thing, you can't go wrong with this movie. There's nothing so abhorrent about it to not recommend it to fans of monster movies like those.