DEEP SHOCK (2002) The box art eel rules! Despite having some of the most bitchin' video box art I've seen in years, Deep Shock does not offer much in the way of great monsters - it has some giant electric eels, which aren't as big (or anywhere near as vicious-looking) as the artwork suggests. But it is one of the less terrible of the many recent giant-animal movies coming out of Eastern Europe. If anything, Deep Shock is a knockoff of The Abyss, instead of a killer animal movie. The parallels just keep coming...the opening encounter between a submarine and a unidentified swimming object, the estranged couple featuring the idealistic scientist wife and the pragmatic company-man husband, the communion between the wife and one of the eels as it pokes its head out of the diving pool, right up to the end where one character gets implosively compressed in an ill-fated diving pod. Keith David (the white one, if like me you can't keep straight which one's Keith David and which one's David Keith) and Simmone Jade Mackinnon play the husband and wife, and she's got great hair. A research base under the Arctic ice (it was named "Hubris", probably around the time they decided it should be "built to withstand the catastrophic pressures from falling ice") has noticed some warming effects which might make Waterworld a true story in a few decades, and it might be all because of giant electric eels beaming transmissions into outer space, for reasons we never get to find out. The eels use lightning bolts to disable the base (and later on use them against nuclear submarines). They go up there to find out what's going on. Yes, the script interchangeably uses the G8 and a very sparsely attended UN, but I was willing to forgive that for a funny line early on about waterskiing. I am less forgiving about the director Philip J. Roth insisting on using title cards to tell us, every single time, when we switch locations. I can sort of understand showing us the UN building and then telling us it's the UN - but since all of the underwater action in this movie takes place in the Arctic ocean, does that have to be pointed out to us every time too? The production values in Deep Shock are very good for this kind of thing. Eels aside, the effects aren't bad at all, though they're a little dark for easily-imagined reasons. The sets are good and solid, and if I didn't quite feel like I was underwater the whole time, I did feel like I was trapped in a tin can the whole time, and that's at least part of what's being striven for. The eels are pretty silly though, especially when they rear up out of the pool and look a bit like skinny, electric blue versions of Puff. You know, the magic dragon. They actually look like they're smiling, in a happy way. That Mackinnon has a psychic-link communion with one of them does not help. She's got sexy covered, and from what little I can tell from this movie, appears to be a pretty capable actor too. But she can't sell me on telepathic communication with an eel. I doubt anyone could. Not exactly something you'd jump up and down with excitement over, Deep Shock is nevertheless better than most of these movies; just don't let the artwork get your hopes up too high over those eels. BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE