DEEP STAR SIX
Unpretentious, well-made fun

  I'll bet that producer Andrew Vajna was always called "Andrew Vagina" as a kid.

Seeing ads for this movie when I was about fifteen, I was convinced it was a filmed version of Michael Crichton's Sphere, which I'd recently read.  I was wrong; Sphere, the movie, wouldn't come out for almost another decade, and nobody would notice when it did.  Deep Star Six was instead the first out of the starting gates in the 1989 "underwater thriller" jackpot - beating The Abyss and Leviathan to the punch.  It's easily the simplest and most straightforward of the three, and the most low-budget, but I found it to be enjoyable.

An underwater rig blasts an enormous undersea cave so that they can install a missile platform on top of it (seems to me that this would create as many problems as it would solve, but hey, what do I know about structural engineering?).  They pick a really lousy place to sit while doing this - on top of the cave.  Anyway, the inhabitant of the cave doesn't take kindly to this and makes their lives miserable.  The tagline promises that the creature in this movie is "beyond your imagination".  Your imagination would have to be pretty limited to be unable to conceive of a giant crustacean.

This is not a really exceptional movie, and its eye-catching box/poster art is probably more responsible for its take than its reputation - most people liked this a lot less than I did.  No boundaries are pushed, no real risks taken, and the plot gives us few surprises (except in its absurdities - more on that in a moment).  Still, it's so straight-ahead and friskily done that it won me over.

The cast is mostly adequate, nobody really embarrassing themselves, not even Greg Evigan, who usually looks like a damn fool no matter what he does.  Miguel Ferrer is the sole standout as the crew member most likely to go nuts, Michael Biehn-style.

The underwater FX are actually better than I seem to remember them - The Abyss this ain't, but considering the relatively meager budget, I'm impressed, and it's actually considerably better-looking than the higher-budgeted Leviathan.  The creature itself isn't really any great shakes, but hey, it's big, crusty, slimy, and bites people in half.  Get me some cute female cast members in soaked T-shirts and I'm a happy guy.

This features one of those movie computers which understand commands in plain English.  My favorite moment happens to be when a character types in a request for the procedure to securing an abandoned missile sled.  He misspells "missile".  The computer answers by inquiring if the sled was "abandoned for repair or or removal".

The "securing" of this missile sled involves the detonation of the trillion-megaton warhead aboard.  Yep, one character angrily, rhetorically asks "Do you know how much water is displaced by a trillion-megaton warhead?" Lemme get this straight - a TRILLION-megaton warhead?  Are we aware of just how big this is?  Do we have this much plutonium on the planet?  The biggest warhead ever tested was, to my knowledge, about 140 megatons.  This is about SEVEN BILLION times as powerful.  If something like this goes off, the people on the other side of the world are gonna have problems, because they're gonna be blasted  right off the surface of the planet.  As for people in the vicinity, they're soon gonna become really well acquainted with the relativistic peculiarities of accelerating to lightspeed from rest in about a nanosecond.  However, this crew is lucky enough to need only contend with the pressure wave.

Yeah, there's some stupid shit like this scattered about in this movie, but that actually enhanced my enjoyment of it for some reason.  Deep Star Six is an unpretentious monster movie with fun situations and some cool monster-on-man action, my favorite being the moment which results in the torn-in-half diving suit you see on the box cover.

The French title for this movie appears to be M.(utant) A.(quatiqeen, whatever that means) L.(ifeform) - or, M.A.L.  "Mal" is the French word for "bad", so one can imagine the dubbed French dialogue consisting of people crying out "Oh no, run away, the bad is after us!  Get away from the bad!"

Directed by Sean S. Cunningham; this was his last directorial effort before he pulled out of the biz (more or less) and (from what I hear) started teaching.

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