I didn’t watch this today, but a movie such as the one I just watched needed a little while to digest. Yes, I watched that movie about people in the ocean that accidentally unleash a monster and have to kill it before it kills them. It’s the one that was released in 1989. Not that one, the good one. No, it’s the one that starred a dude from ROBOCOP.
No, not that one either. I’m talking about DEEPSTAR SIX. Yes, the one that has Miguel Ferrer, not Peter Weller. It also has Briana Evigan’s origins, Greg Evigan, as the submarine pilot with a pretty manly beard.
In many ways, there’s a battle going on. A battle between those that think that LEVIATHAN is better than DEEPSTAR SIX and those that think that DEEPSTAR SIX is better than LEVIATHAN. This is the reason why America went to with Britain, and why Britain has a widescreen DVD release of DEEPSTAR SIX and America doesn’t.
For those that don’t know, this is a movie about a secret underwater science/military station where the crew is tasked with installing an underwater nuclear missile platform. This is the late eighties, so I’m not exactly sure who the enemy we need nuclear weapons against is since the Cold War is over and Russia has McDonald’s. Seriously, there’s a Russian crew member on the station that helps them with the assignment. Honestly, he’s played by Elya Baskin, so I’m pretty sure that he’s supposed to be Russian. I have no idea why this would be the case. That said, the enemy is us, because Man is the real monster. That’s the theme of this movie, spoiler warning.
The funny thing is that the film, for the first hour where the monster that isn’t Man isn’t onscreen, plays out like a late eighties/early nineties sitcom set on a secret underwater science/military station. It has the makings of it, with a cast of quirky scientists and engineers. You may not think that this is the intention, but Matt McCoy’s presence as the horndog engineer doesn’t help dissuade the audience from this belief. More so, the movie starts out with a woman talking to a man about marriage and the man’s reluctance to. Yeah, I guess you can see where this is going.
This is not actually a bad thing. And, I’m not even mentioning Nia Peeples as the sexy and earnest scientist, Scarpelli.
Watching this movie for the fourth or fifth time ever, I have to say that the sea monster, who I have named Chester, is the real victim in this movie.
This is Chester. He is the victim of this movie.
Chester’s involvement in the plot is because people from the station blow up a bomb above the underwater cave that is his home. He is naturally annoyed by this, and because every sea monster’s cave is his underwater castle, he defends it. This action results in the death of the people that blew up his cave in the first place. This is rather reasonable, all things considered.
He finds another group of humans in some type of mobile underwater mobile home thing and sideswipes them. Two more people die, though it isn’t completely Chester’s fault. One of them dies because the door mechanism was shoddy. Chester had no idea that the mobile home had shoddy craftsmanship. To add insult to injury, as a safety precaution, Snyder (Miguel Ferrer) blows up their nuclear missiles because he is an idiot. As you can imagine, the force of the blast has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is through the water. It damages the undersea station, and I imagine peeves Chester off even more. As a result, in what is still reasonable, he decides to go to the station and give them what-for. By that I mean ripping Matt McCoy in half.
This is still completely reasonable behavior.
Completely. Reasonable. Behavior.
Anyway, the humans decide that the only course of action is to kill Chester because it’s their right to blow up missiles all willy-nilly wherever they want. Even on top of some sea dude’s cave. And so they load up shotguns and a nifty shark harpoon that shoots a charge of CO2 into anything it stabs, from a seat cushion to a dude’s back.
I think you can guess what ends up happening. Freakin’ Miguel Ferrer.
Freakin’ Miguel Ferrer.
Anyway, Chester goes on something of a rampage, which is actually rather difficult considering that his eyes are on top of his mouth flap. When he opens his mouth, his eyes move upwards. Yeah, Mother Nature was not kind to him. That’s in addition to the humans that blew up his cave home and blew up a bunch of nuclear missiles in case he missed the point.
Completely. Reasonable. Behavior.
Ferrer flips out, because that’s the type of guy he is. Seriously, he’s drugged and he hallucinates about the dude that he killed. He gets on board an escape sub to escape, but in his panic doesn’t remember that he need to depressurize because he’s under the water. In some circles, that’s almost ironic. Or poetic justice.
Two people, who I won’t spoil who they are, survive these shenanigans, and in one of those “Surprise! I’m alive” endings, kill Chester who followed them up after they escaped the destruction of the undersea station and believed that Chester had been caught in the blast.
Chester, who only wanted justice after Americans blew up his home and detonated weapons of mass destruction there. I think we know who the real villains of this movie are.
Completely. Reasonable. Behavior.
Is this movie better than that other sea monster movie starring an actor from ROBOCOP? Maybe, maybe not.
But I will say this. The real monster is Man, and we can all learn a little something from Chester about the dangers about invading other people’s homes and blowing stuff up that we don’t understand. You can’t hug your children with nuclear arms.
Sucks to be you, Papa Dragon.
I’m on Team DEEPSTAR SIX.