Review of Leviathan (1989) by Neil L — 13 Apr 2011

Great set design / good writing / lame monster. To be clear, the creature feature "Leviathan" is the movie that gets muddled in your memory with "Alien", "The Abyss", "DeepStar Six", "Deep Rising" and several other claustrophobic undersea or outspace sci-fi films.

If, for unfathomable reasons, you needed to draw a distinction, this one has the really lame fish monster. And the human / mackerel / alien hybrid mess is unfortunate because the writers made a laudable attempt to imbue its eventual victims with realistic personalities, foibles, petty gripes, jealousies and sub-plot lines.

For some reason many of the cast members playing these characters are distractingly thin particularly Peter Weller, Daniel Stern and Amanda Pays. Stern appears positively emaciated while Pays manages not to pose much threat to censors even during the obligatory scene where she is stripped to her underwear and doused with seawater.

One assumes the film's craft services sucked. The high point of the cast, as he is with most of his films (which is not saying much given he costarred with Sylvester Stallone in three "Rambo" pictures), rests with the permanently at-rest Richard Crenna.

Crenna exemplified square-jarred, middle American, straight-shooting authority and was criminally underutilized. In particular, he deserved a much high level of stardom by using the instant trust he generated in audiences in work where he turns out to secretly be the heavy (as he sort of is here).

Theorizing why Hollywood failed to impart on Crenna the stardom he richly deserved deserved stands as a valuable pastime while wading through the wildly unconvincing scenes of miners supposedly 2 miles undersea ("remember actors, walk really slow and deliberate because all that water would probably be heavy!") and any scene involving Aquaman's congenitally deformed fourth cousin.

In short, rent "First Blood" and watch all scenes where real men (a now extinct species) Richard Crenna faces off against Brian Dennehy (skip any scene with Stallone) instead of sitting through "Leviathan".