Deepstar Six is the story of an underwater habitat set up to locate, place and build an underwater launch platform for nuclear missiles for the US Navy. Six months in, they are already three months overdue for finishing their job, and the inhabitants are getting a little stir-crazy. With only a week before the deadline, the captain and the doctor in charge are pushing the crew a little hard. When the final site for the last missile silo is about to be finalized, sonar soundings reveal a large cavern beneath the site. Because any instability in the sea floor might throw off the missile's targeting systems, the small crew in charge of placing the final silo is ordered to blow up the cavern and place the silo atop the flattened area. The technician team sent to blow up the cavern is nearly swallowed by the collapse of the sea floor, and the biologist warns that the cavern could contain sea life that is hundreds or thousands of years old. The technicians send in a remote camera to explore the remains of the cavern, and the camera is lost. The technicians go in after the camera drone, and the work team loses contact with the technicians. Then, Deepstar Six, the habitat containing the rest of the underwater team, loses contact with the work crew. Yep, you guessed it. All hell has broken loose.
Deepstar Six has a number of veteran actors among the cast. Greg Evigan plays a mini-sub driver who is friends with the Captain of Deepstar Six. Nia Peeples plays the biologist who tries to warn them to proceed with caution. Miguel Ferrer (son of jose ferrer, whom you may remember from the original Robocop) does an awesome job playing the fuckup that manages to make everything go from bad, to really, really, really bad. Matt McCoy (who was good in Abominable, which was one of the few mildly scary bigfoot movies) is the mini-sub co-pilot, and Elya Baskin (who I last saw in Spider-Man, playing Peter Parker's affable landlord) plays a scientist on the work crew. All of these are veteran actors, but the movie is of rushed along by the action, leaving little time for character development.
There's a lot of water, a lot of explosions, and a bit of a weird conundrum that I haven't really been able to figure out. Spoilers to follow, because, well, this movie is ancient and not really that good. Supposedly, this thing is large enough to take out a camera drone, then a small work vehicle, then knock the large, heavy work station over the edge of the sea wall. When seen on radar, it's mistaken for a whale, and it moves ridiculously fast underwater. Then it attacks the large steel habitat, hard enough to do damage. Then... it sneaks in through an airlock and is only slightly larger than one of the underwater work suits the divers wear. Wait. What? Now I'm confused. End spoilers.
Deepstar Six, despite the adequate acting job by the veteran cast, lacks in a number of other areas. While technically somewhat sound, with reasonable special effects, the monster and the whole plot around it is somewhat lacking. The action tries to move you along fast enough that you don't have time to think about it, and that is somewhat successful, but then you wonder why someone like Snyder (Miguel Ferrer), who is so ridiculously inept that they'd never have let him handle scrubbing the toilets, let alone working the machinery. Minus the ever-shrinking beast and Snyder's complete idiocy, the movie might have been entertainingly thrilling. With them, you just wonder how Snyder didn't manage to wreck the place his first week there, instead of 6 months in, because the 'monster' certainly couldn't have done the damage without a lot of help.
Surprisingly, each of the three underwater movies I mentioned above, Deepstar Six, the Abyss and Leviathan, all have a similar background. They each have an undersea base, they each have a monster, and they each have paranoia generated by the Russians. There was a Cold War going on between the US and Russia at the time, and they made good villains in all three of these movies, despite the fact that no russians actually showed up in any of them. Well, unless you count Elya Baskin, who acted in Deepstar Six, and may very well be russian (I'm too lazy to look it up). Still, the paranoia and tension at the time was enough to serve well as the backdrop to these movies.
This movie is currently on Netflix if you want to watch it, however, I highly recommend watching Leviathan instead if you want a solid B-monster-movie, or the Abyss if you want something a bit more uplifting (and a bit more A-list). There's no nudity in Deepstar Six, but the gorgeous Nia Peeples almost has a shower scene anyway. So, if you like almost seeing Nia Peeples naked, or want to see a wise-cracking Matt McCoy, Deepstar six is the movie for you. Otherwise, this movie is memorable only for the massive screwups, both on purpose (Snyder) and by accident (the incredible shrinking monster). Watch it once to laugh at Snyder's screwups, then move on.
That's all for tonight. Catch you guys next weekend!
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