More like DerpStar

DeepStar Six (1989) is one of those underwater creature features, like The Abyss. In fact, it was made the same your as Abyss, probably to cash in. We’re watching to round out our underwater portfolio. This version has a nice low-budget traditional monster movie feel.

DeepStar Six is an underwater mining platform, currently under contract to the DoD to do something with nukes. Marius Weyers, a stiff and distant European-ish scientist, is the leader, and he’s worried about being behind schedule. When a cavern shows up on a survey, he decides to just blow it up and remove any possible instability. They send a probe into the open cavern and it gets lost. They send a mini-sub in to retrieve it (probes aren’t cheap), and they don’t come back. There’s something down there.

They do the sensible thing and decide to get out of there. But before they do, the creature (which we still haven’t seen) attacks DeepStar Six. The captain, Taurean Blacque (great stage name!), gets stuck in a wonky pressure door, and in one of the best kills in the movie, is bisected.

Meanwhile, Miguel Ferrer is a sort of Army fuck-up, who does everything by the book, but wrong. Before they can leave, they need to secure the nuke. In case of hostile action, the procedure is to set it off, which he does without really warning anyone or thinking around the blast zone. This isn’t the last time he’ll put the whole thing in jeopardy.

By the way, the monster is some kind of crab creature, and we do get to see it eventually. It’s pretty clearly a guy in a crab suit, but not bad.

In fact, that’s what’s endearing about this movie. The exteriors are clearly models and the monster is a guy in a suit. It doesn’t break suspension of disbelief but it isn’t trying to get points for special effects. And there’s a couple of good kills. And it doesn’t have a ridiculous ending like, say, Sphere.