I haven’t
spent a lot of time on the great monster movies that came out in the eighties and
I thought it was about time to change that. Though instead of starting off with
one of the really good ones the Greg Evigan vehicle Deepstar Six went to the
top of the list. Mostly because I saw it on my Amazon Prime watchlist and I
hadn’t watched it in years. I had totally forgotten that Sean S. Cunningham of
Friday the 13th fame directed this!
A team
made up of Navy personnel and civilians are working to install an underwater
missile platform. They are behind schedule which makes some of them annoyed and
others in a hurry. A decision is made to blast a cavern underneath the site
without exploring it first. Of course, being a creature feature that doesn’t
end well as they unleash something horrible. It first attacks the subs, but is
soon drawn to Deepstar Six, the station where they all live. The creature gets
loose and a lot of crew die in the process of trying to escape to the surface.
Basically, your typical monster movie.
There
isn’t much to say about most of Deepstar Six. You have the normal hero and love
interest dynamic between Evigan’s character and Nancy Everhard’s. Though they
do try and throw a curve ball with a pregnancy. There is the smartass and
ultimate screw up played by the late great Miguel Ferrer. This is one of the
highlights of the movie. Ferrer’s character, Snyder, is part idiot and part
coward. Seriously he is a menace. From accidentally setting off a nuclear bomb
that wrecks the station, to shooting one of the survivors with a shark gun that
explodes his chest, to stealing the only escape pod in a fit of panic the guy
causes more deaths than the monster. Well it might not quite be that bad, but
it is close.
The rest
of the story follows a familiar pattern of people unleash something terrible by
their own stupidity or arrogance. Here it is partly both. Then our cast is
picked off one at a time by the creature, which is kept mostly out of sight
until things get really rolling. This build up is fun because you don’t have
any idea what it is until you get it on screen. Heck even after we see it, I
still wasn’t sure what the damn thing was supposed to be which gives the movie
a weirdly cool vibe. The monster is alien but not in the from outer space sort
of way but in the what the hell is it way.
The above
isn’t meant to imply the creature design was bad. It’s effective and looks like
an animal that is strange enough to be from the bottom of the sea, while still
realistic enough to possibly exist. The kills are pretty tame and involve a
mini sub getting crushed off screen, a diver in an underwater suit getting
split in half, and a nasty bit with a door crushing someone. But the two best
kills are when the shark gun explodes a character’s chest and when Snyder takes
the escape pod without decompressing. The second involves veins throbbing and
blood flowing in a bit of practical special effects work that I really dug.
Deepstar
Six isn’t a great movie. That said I think it is a decent entry into that
second tier of monster movies that the Aliens and Jaws series inspired. If you
have some time and a hankering to check out Greg Evigan in his best non-truck
driving role then this is the movie for you. Consider it recommended.
© Copyright 2019 John Shatzer
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