Deep Rising (Review)

"Help me, I'm trapped in a shitty movie!"

“Help me, I’m trapped in a shitty movie!”

This movie redefines underwhelming, I hated this film.

Before I watched it I thought that it had all the hallmarks of a good B monster movie, within minutes I realized that there was no chance I was discovering a new Tremors, Slither or The Blob, I was just watching a shitty movie.

Given this website continually references and highlights low profile and low budget films, I find myself wanting to like films at times when I know they aren’t really that amazing, that lasted only seconds here.

Deep Rising is like a meat pie, it takes bits of hundreds of things and tries to make them appear more appetizing. You know you probably shouldn’t eat it but sometimes you do anyway, as it’s quick and easy. Replace “eat” with “watch”, and take out probably. This isn’t so bad it’s good, it’s so bad it’s fucking awful.

The first alarm bells rang for me before I watched a single scene, the film is preceded by an onscreen blurb informing the viewer that parts of the ocean are pretty deep and have never been explored, or something similar.

It’s never a good sign when this occurs in a horror or action movie, especially one as cheerfully stupid as this one. If you aren’t smart enough to tell your audience key information through dialogue or action you might need to reconsider your ability.

I’ll recap what I witnessed in the first three minutes:

  1. Bad Music
  2. Bad Acting
  3. Bad Dialogue
  4. Bad Jokes

First the music is terrible and inappropriate, almost to the point where I wondered if the man responsible had even seen the movie or knew what it was about. The acting is just awful, like they are rehearsing and the director said “that’ll do”, but in a half-hearted defence of the actors I must say that when you have to make ludicrously cheesy dialogue and try to sell crap jokes I might coast too.

The plot is unnecessarily convoluted, a boat is chartered to take a team of mercenaries to an undisclosed location, we soon realize that this location is a massive new cruise liner called the Argonautica, apparently on its maiden voyage. We meet the team of mercenaries and I immediately added a new category: Bad Accents

As an example one of the mercenaries identifies themselves as an Australian, (I am also Australian), but in the next scene I could no longer work out which one was Australian as none of the team used even a vaguely recognizable Aussie accent.

In the first scene involving the mercenaries, full of just pointlessly fake macho dialogue, I was able for the first time to differentiate between B movie actors and B grade actors. B movie actors can often be good at their jobs, B grade actors are just bad. This is straight B grade all the way.

Famke Janssen does her career no favours by playing a pickpocket who is aboard the cruise ship to rob the wealthy passengers, in yet another sign that this isn’t a Best Picture nominee she is able to get into a high tech computer controlled vault using bubblegum! After being caught in the act she is locked in a storeroom.

Shortly after this the ship’s supercomputer is shut down in seconds by a virus, again a multi-million dollar structure is rendered vulnerable simply and almost instantly.

While I am on a roll pointing out stupidity why use Famke in the role of a pickpocket, hot chicks don’t bother robbing rich guys, they marry them.

Of course now that the liner is incapacitated somewhat “something” hits the ship, passengers panic and scatter, taking cover where they can. In yet another logically deficient scene, a lady locks herself in a bathroom and sits on the toilet, only to be sucked into the toilet in a spray of blood. Shortly after when we see what is aboard, we realize that this wasn’t actually possible but was put in because it supposedly was cool.

Fast forward a sec, the mercenaries are now aboard what appears to be a deserted ship, with what CSI would call “evidence of a struggle”. Famke is able to once again MacGyver herself out of the storeroom by cutting all the wires on the security system at once, just like the pros do it!

The next ten minutes maintain the usual low standards, bad special effects, stupid red herring scares and blatant rip offs of other (better) films. The highly trained mercenaries have never heard of short controlled bursts and just blaze away randomly.

In one supposedly tense scene our heroes are running away from the massive squidy grooblers, but decide that they have time for a calm composed chat in an open hallway. I’d laugh but I was too busy crying.

The comic relief is provided by the ship’s engineer, who whines his way through the movie sounding like the Squeaky Voiced Teen from The Simpsons and spits out lame joke after lame joke, in the latter stages he is shot in the leg and just spends the remainder of his scenes limping mildly. Now I have sprained my ankle many times, and I am aware that being shot in the leg would be far more serious, yet when I sprain my ankle I am unable to even limp without pain, let alone jog around.

Further blatant ignorance of logic occurs, when the heroes escape by shooting the control panels of several doors, one of which opens out to the sea for some reason, perhaps poor design?

The ending comes far too late for my liking and predictably enough is worse than your average sit-com, where someone cracks a bad joke and they freeze frame on fake laughter.

I have read recently that changing a director can have a radical impact on the finished film but I don’t usually think too much about such things, here though is a case where I am positive that 75 other directors could come up with a far superior picture using the same basic material. A quick check on imbd shows me the same guy made Van Helsing, another laughable effort, notable only for Kate Beckinsale wearing tight pants.

The director blatantly ripped ideas and scenes from Die Hard 2, Alien, Predator, Alien: Resurrection, Tremors and Anaconda and even the worst of these (that would be Alien 4) is several times better than Deep Rising. It’s rubbish.

I hope I have made myself clear. I hated this film. Easily the worst film I have watched since I started writing about them on this site.

(In case you were wondering, I deliberately avoided listing character names or describing too much more than the flaws, this film simply doesn’t deserve attention to detail.)

I HATED THIS FILM.

Final Rating – 2.5 / 10. In retrospect I can’t even see where the 2.5 points are earned, I just need room in case something worse comes up. I’ll be waiting a while I think.

About OGR

While I try to throw a joke or two into proceedings when I can all of the opinions presented in my reviews are genuine. I don't expect that all will agree with my thoughts at all times nor would it be any fun if you did, so don't be shy in telling me where you think I went wrong... and hopefully if you think I got it right for once. Don't be shy, half the fun is in the conversation after the movie.
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