Blub blub, it’s Burl, here to review one of the several
underwater movies that were released in 1989! These titles included The Abyss, Leviathan, and this one, Deep
Star Six! Ha ha, I did my duty by seeing each one of these in the theatre,
though I missed out entirely on their waterlogged little contemporaries, Endless Descent and Full Fathom Five!
Of the big three, Deep
Star Six is the closest to being something Roger Corman might have made!
It’s a killer crawdad picture after all, as a creature resembling a vagina dentata with google eyes invades
an underwater facility and wreaks – well, not quite as much direct havoc as you
might hope, but he certainly causes problems! Ha ha! And the movie was directed
by Sean S. Cunningham, he of Friday the 13th fame, so you know B-movie goofiness is a distinct
possibility!
Deep Star Six is
set in another one of your standard-issue seabottom complexes, this one some
sort of military-industrial operation involving undersea missile platforms! It
doesn’t really matter what they’re doing down there, because whatever it was,
it would probably have lead to the same thing: the reckless opening of a cavern
and the release of the crabby creature!
Ha ha, he’s no mere Island Claws-style giant crab – more of a close cousin to one of the grabby
varmints from The Lost Continent, I
would say! It’s what the monster from Blood Beach probably should have looked like, ha ha if we were ever given a
proper look at him! But the hardshell in Deep
Star Six, as irate and hungry as he is, doesn’t create nearly as much
trouble for the characters as they give themselves! One of them, a Hudson
figure played by Miguel “Robocop”
Ferrer, is about the whiniest fellow ever seen on screen, and his tenure on the
undersea platform is a catalogue of fatal blunders! It’s really just one fatal
blunder after another with this guy, ha ha, and of course he saves his last one
for himself!
The boss of the platform is, if you can believe it, the guy
from The Gods Must Be Crazy! Ha ha,
no, not N!xau, but the other one! (I wish it had been N!xau, though - that would have been great!) His staff
includes B.J. from that terrific program B.J.
and the Bear, and, in another unfortunately abbreviated role, a neckbearded
Thom Bray from Prince of Darkness,
also known as the nerd from Riptide!
(Or was it Simon & Simon?) There’s
also a Russian guy who reminded me so strongly of Yakov Smirnoff I thought I
was watching Brewster’s Millions
again! Really, most of the cast are TV actors willing to get wet, and they’re a
game bunch!
As I’ve implied, the monster doesn’t get all that much to do
in the picture! I don’t think he puts an actual biting on more than two of
them, though one of these incidents, the guy in the metal diving suit who gets
chomped like a Jolly Rancher, is memorable! Ha ha! The rest is blunders, poor
judgment and faulty equipment! Of course this is all indirectly caused or
helped along by the crustacean’s presence, but still, he should have got those
big flappy jaws working away more, and not just to emit roars like the Creeping Terror carpet monsters! The
movie as a whole takes too long to get going, and there’s some soap opera stuff
that might have been dropped!
A
final scene, shot in a studio tank so obvious it lends an air of poetic
unreality, brings us just the sort of shock moment Cunningham supplied at the
end of Friday the 13th,
and thus is the movie concluded! It’s a real beezer, though I kind of like the
look of it, and was amazed to think of myself at an age where movies I saw
first-run at the theatres have trick effect shots that now look like something
you’d have seen in Irwin Allen’s Voyage
To the Bottom of the Sea! For being number three but trying harder, but
also for not showing as much pep as it could have, I give Deep Star Six one and a half nonsense vector-graphic radar screens!
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