"Chinese machine guns. Rampaging seafood. Anybody ordered kraken Fu-Yung?"
Deep Rising is a film I've wanted to see ever since it came out, me being a sucker for both derelict-set films and tentacled monsters. Trouble is, I was put off at the time by the er... lukewarm reviews, so I steered clear and let it disappear beyond the horizon, knowing we were bound to meet again in a bargain bin some years later. My aching heart was finally healed last weekend when I picked up a VHS copy for 50 cents, which is basically the amount I had set out to spend on the film back in 1998. Having now seen it, I can confess that it was pretty much the generic Alien clone I had been warned against, but with somewhat of a flair for monster aesthetics. Is that enough to recommend the film? I'll let you decide...
The premise is simple enough: heavily armed pirates wish to loot a luxurious cruise ship sailing south of China, but they are beaten to the punch by a massive sea monster from the deep, hence the title. The tables are turned, and the hunters become the hunted. Armed with state-of-the-art Chinese machine guns (some special treats for gun nuts), the wise-cracking goons try their best to fend off what first appears to be a swarm of submerged predators. When these "predators" are revealed to be mere appendixes of a much larger creature, the film branches toward the familiar route of survivalist horror and what little suspense was lingering in the air dissipates. The tradeoff is worthwhile however, since the creature revealed is simply gorgeous. It can best be described as an early CGI kraken with teeth-filled tentacles that absorb their preys and "drink them alive", thus allowing for lenghty moments of human agony and a nice variety of liquified corpses lying around the scenery. Once revealed, the monster starts attacking by squirming through narrow corridors and loudly banging on walls, picking off the characters one by one, until the obvious survivors devise a way to escape from the mess, doing various stunts and surviving various explosions in the process. It's all mindless entertainment that offers no surprises. The dialogues are okay despite the generic characterization that plagues almost all pirate films, and charismatic leads TreatWilliams and Famke Jenssen are right at home in their roles. But in the the end, the monster is by far the film's main asset, which makes sense considering the few narrative possibilities offered by the premise.
The premise is simple enough: heavily armed pirates wish to loot a luxurious cruise ship sailing south of China, but they are beaten to the punch by a massive sea monster from the deep, hence the title. The tables are turned, and the hunters become the hunted. Armed with state-of-the-art Chinese machine guns (some special treats for gun nuts), the wise-cracking goons try their best to fend off what first appears to be a swarm of submerged predators. When these "predators" are revealed to be mere appendixes of a much larger creature, the film branches toward the familiar route of survivalist horror and what little suspense was lingering in the air dissipates. The tradeoff is worthwhile however, since the creature revealed is simply gorgeous. It can best be described as an early CGI kraken with teeth-filled tentacles that absorb their preys and "drink them alive", thus allowing for lenghty moments of human agony and a nice variety of liquified corpses lying around the scenery. Once revealed, the monster starts attacking by squirming through narrow corridors and loudly banging on walls, picking off the characters one by one, until the obvious survivors devise a way to escape from the mess, doing various stunts and surviving various explosions in the process. It's all mindless entertainment that offers no surprises. The dialogues are okay despite the generic characterization that plagues almost all pirate films, and charismatic leads TreatWilliams and Famke Jenssen are right at home in their roles. But in the the end, the monster is by far the film's main asset, which makes sense considering the few narrative possibilities offered by the premise.
In the end, it's just a question of whether your love for machine guns and tentacles can outweigh your discrimination in matters of generic survivalist scenarios. To try to settle this age-old dilemma, I will say this: blasés genre freaks such as myself should steer clear altogether, while neophytes might get a kick out of such a rare race-against-squirming-death film featuring primitve, but surprisingly effective monster CGI. And personal appreciation aside, I'm sure Deep Rising would make an awesome date movie as long as one can successfully convert the squirming onscreen into female squirming...
2/5 (Very) generic film is kept afloat by an awesome beastie (and awesome machine guns).
