Forgotten Film Friday: Deep Rising

One of my favorite genres is a giant monster eating people. That goes back to my love of Jaws and moves like Beast from 20,00 Fathoms and Them! But my favorite monster movies come from the 1990s. I love films like Tremors, Mimic, The Relic (stay tuned for that), and Deep Blue Sea, which has maybe the greatest death scene in cinema history. But my absolute favorite is 1998’s Deep Rising, directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Treat Williams, Famke Janssen, Wes Studi, and a giant octopus like creature. 

The plot is fairly standard. A team of mercenaries looking to hijack a luxury cruise liner finds the place deserted and crawling with nasty tentacle monsters. They are joined by the surviving members of the ship’s crew, basically the financier and captain and a thief who had been detained in the brig. Now they all need to get off the ship before they’re meals for these creatures. Let’s do this. 

What works here is the tremendous cast and that the film takes the time to develop these characters. The creature doesn’t show up until about twenty minutes in and it’s forty minutes until the main cast has any sort of run in with it. We get to know the three crew members who have been hired by the mercenaries for transportation. We even understand the bond the mercenaries. Yeah they’re assholes but we kind of like them.

Deep Rising also bucks tradition by not having any real good guys. The main character is a black market transport guy. The mercenaries that hired him are sort of antagonists to him and his crew for the start but eventually everyone is working together against the monster.  Plus the mercenaries never have any plans to kill any of the passengers. Their bad guys but they aren’t evil by any stretch of the imagination. The second main lead is a thief who planned to rob everyone on the ship blind. The head of the cruise line is the actual main antagonist besides the monster. So yeah a bunch of dudes, and one lady, who would probably be the villains in any other movie fighting a giant octopus. 

When you go see a movie about a giant monster, you expect that monster to eat people and boy does our octopus friend here eat people. The deaths in this are so great and each one is a little different, which is tough to do when it’s just dudes getting eaten. The film also has a good use of atmosphere. The initial monster attack on the cruise ship is effective but then the ship goes silent for when the mercenaries arrive and we spend some time wandering the new ghost ship. 

Deep Rising has one big flaw that can be overlooked and is a product of the time but it’s there. The CGI is not that great. The creature design is great but the use of CGI instead of practical just doesn’t pay off. It’s bad late ‘90s CGI. There’s just a fake tinge to this that doesn’t exist when effects are done practically. After Jurassic Park there’s no excuse for bad CGI or not using practical effects. But Deep Rising had some budget issues as after Harrison Ford passed on the film the budget was cut in half. 

The film did poorly at the box office and killed off a rather interesting proposed film series. This was supposed to be the prequel to Sommers next project, a King Kong film to pair with the Godzilla reboot that had just come out. (by the way that film is garbage, don’t watch it.) The ending at Deep Rising hints at a land based creature and that was supposed to be Kong but it never came together due to the film’s failure. 

This is the definition of a popcorn film and is for any fan of a good monster movie. It does what it’s supposed to do and probably a little better then most. The hour and forty five minute run time flies by and it’s just a good time. It’s not high art or classy cinema but it is a ton of fun.