2.7/10
14%
1.9/5
29%
I decided to stick with my underwater movie marathon which accidentally started when I watched Leviathan (1989) a few days ago. In that review I explained that a slew of studios rushed to put out underwater “creature features” in order to capitalise on the hype surrounding James Cameron’s 1989 film The Abyss.
While Leviathan was a reasonable film considering its budget and was certainly carried by its stars, Lords of the Deep is quite a step down in terms of both production and acting quality, but it’s a Roger Corman produced film so you know what you’re getting in to!
What’s Lords of the Deep About?
Lords of the Deep sees us enter the far future of the 2020s and we join the crew of an underwater laboratory as they carry out tests to see whether minerals and sea life from the bottom of the Earth’s oceans can improve life on the surface. In this movie’s timeline, the Earth’s surface has been rendered almost uninhabitable due to the ozone layer being depleted. This was quite timely as the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctica had been discovered just 4 years before this film’s release.
The inhabitants of the underwater outpost go about their experiments with what I can only describe as an extreme lack of care and attention to detail. In one of the first scenes of the movie, we see Dr. Claire McDowell (Priscilla Barnes, Licence To Kill – 1989) working with some form of gelatinous substance. She’s not in a hazmat suit, she’s not wearing a mask but she is wearing gloves — that is until she removes one of them and sticks her hand into the goo without even knowing what it will do!
Now you might think that this is the catalyst for the disaster that’s bound to befall the station and it is — but not in the way you might think!
I was thinking that maybe Claire would get infected with a virus from the goo and mutate into a giant blob or something, but alas no. Instead she has some sort of weird trippy psychedelic experience where she travels through space or something in totally not a knock off from the travelling through the Jupiter monolith scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey at all.
We then meet our typical villain for a movie of this type: the by-the book Company Man who puts profits and pension over personnel. In this film the company man is Commander Stuart Dobler (Bradford Dillman – Sudden Impact, 1983) and his trusty sidekick, a supercomputer called “Trilby”.
Trilby seems to have skipped the the day at computer school where they covered Isaac Asimov’s first law of robotics (A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm) and who is totally not a rip-off of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey .
Hang on, am I detecting a theme here?
A crew rotation submarine is making its way to the base, but after an underwater earthquake knocks out comms they have no way of contacting the sub or finding out if they are in one piece.
A search and rescue sub is sent from the laboratory and when they find the transfer vehicle they see that its hatch is blown and its flooded with water with no sign of the crew anywhere.
Chadwick (Richard Young – Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade,1989) is working outside of the station and he’s attacked by these big ray-like creatures, he manages to escape and make it to the station’s airlock but when the crew pull him out of the water and take off his diving helmet they discover that he’s melted and looks eerily like the goo that Claire was shoving her hand into in her lab.
Again, I figured that the goo was important here and that with the rays seemingly gooifying Chadwick something must be going on with Claire. But no, it’s never really explained what happened to him and if he was being morphed into something else or he was gooified by accident.
Things are further complicated when the goo that Claire was working on somehow transforms from a small puddle into one of the ray creatures which escapes Claire’s lab and hides in the stations’s pipework somehow. Despite the fact that it’s the size of a person it can stick it’s tail (or fin, it wasn’t really clear) through a sink’s plughole so it’s either very flexible or the special effects team forgot how big it was meant to be.
Dobler wants to keep the ray creature a secret and tries to get everyone to sign an NDA but Claire refuses stating that these creatures are wonderful scientific discoveries that need to be properly studied, not hidden away. I do wonder exactly how Claire would study the creatures seeing as she just randomly shoves her gloveless hands in her experiments but maybe it’s best not to dwell on that too deeply.
As tensions starts to rise, Dobler begins to lose the plot and becomes paranoid that the crew are out to get him because he wants to hide the ray creature. To protect himself he reprogrammes Trilby to start to take out the remaining crew by tricking them into rooms and turning off the air supply — and you thought your Alexa was annoying!
It’s now a race against time for Claire, her boyfriend Jack O’Neill (No, not that Jack O’Neill – Daryl Haney – Masque of the Red Death, 1989) and the other scientists as they try to evade Dobler and Trilby’s efforts to kill them, evade the weird rays who may or may not be out to get them, and make it to the safety before another earthquake strikes.
The Good
The acting isn’t too bad in Lords Of The Deep although looking at the cast a lot of them seem to be from a television background but they gel together well and make the best of a somewhat incoherent script.
There are plenty of ecological messages smattered through the storyline too which, for 1989, was quite a novelty — especially as people didn’t seem to understand the how much of a massive danger the depleting ozone layer was (seems like not a lot has changed in 40 years!) It did get a bit heavy-handed and preachy at points though which probably turned people off from the messaging instead of encouraging them to think more about the environment and what we’re doing to it.
And I thought the set design was quite good as well. It was a lot more futuristic and spacious than those of Leviathan which is in keeping with it’s more futuristic/science-themed plot points although you could tell that it was made on the cheap as most Corman-production sets are.
And I will give credit to Bradford Dillman whose unravelling Dobler really lifts the acting out of the sewer. While we might not know exactly why he’s going off his rocker, he certainly sells it with his acting skills!
The Bad
The plot is very thin on the ground if you can call what happens a plot! It’s more like a series of set-piece scenes loosely linked together that seem to ignore or forget what’s just happened in the scene before it.
To me it’s almost like the film started out in its production lifecycle as a “lost in space” film, where our team are on a space station or deep space research vessel when trouble strikes and then when Corman heard about Cameron’s The Abyss he did a find and replace and changed all the mentions of space to sea and aliens to rays.
This would certainly explain the disjointed narrative and odd choice of creatures in this film!
As a side note as I didn’t know where else to add in this little fun fact: James Cameron got his start in Hollywood under Roger Corman, creating special effects for films like Battle Beyond The Stars and directing Piranha 2, although he would ask for his credit to be removed!
The Ugly
I wouldn’t say this is “ugly ugly”, but the creature design is terrible, I mean TERRIBLE.
Spoiler below for an image of one of the ray creatures
I know this is a low budget film but when the trailer is touting that the film is “from the Academy Award winning special effects team that brought you Aliens” and the result is more Golden Raspberry Award rather than Oscar winning, it doesn’t really inspire confidence in the rest of the film’s production quality.
The creature effects could have been handled so much better too. If we take Leviathan as an example, they didn’t show the creature too much in order get get around difficulties in filming it, moving it and making it. With Lords of the Deep the creature is on full display and you should only really attempt this if the creature design (whether that be CGI, practical models, make-up or a man in a suit) will hold up on film and it really doesn’t here.
What would have been much more preferable is maybe only seeing part of the creature rather than the entire thing, and having it appear in darkened scenes which modern film making uses to hide the imperfections in CGI action sequences.
Instead what we got was a rather laughable creature design that didn’t know what size it was or even whether it had legs or not (how can it walk down a corridor otherwise?) which really took me out of the film and actually ruined what had been quite a fun if cheesy experience up until that point.
Final Thoughts
Lords of the Deep isn’t a terrible movie as such, it’s just a badly cobbled together film which is a shame as it could have been a reasonable low-budget B movie. Instead it’s all over the place with inconsistent plot points and a storyline that almost makes sense but doesn’t quite manage it.
As I mentioned, the acting (most notably by Bradford Dillman) is reasonable and lifts the film up from being truly awful to just mediocre and I wonder what have happened if the production was run by a more experienced team.
Sure, you had the master of a tight budget Roger Corman as producer. If his name is familiar it’s because Corman is synonymous with low-cost productions having produced over 480 and directing over 50 of them, but then you take a look at director and you can perhaps see where the wheels came off.
The film was helmed by Mary Ann Fisher in her one and only directing credit. Previously she had been a producer on Corman’s Battle Beyond The Stars (1980) and a few other lower-budget “B” movies of the 1980s and I think her lack of experience shows.
As I noted earlier, the reveal of the full ray model ruins what could have been an interesting take on the creatures. I am a big fan of “less is more” which this film certainly would have benefitted from, and I think it would have been the case if Fisher had more experience behind the camera.
While I wouldn’t tell you to go out of your way to watch Lords of the Deep, if you do happen to see it on late one night it’s certainly something to fall asleep to.
Watch this if you regularly throw health and safety out of the window and would happily stick your un-gloved hand into a pile of goo that may or may not kill you.
