Want to Hear My Dog Imitation?

Opinions on Deep Rising (1998) seem to be split: It’s a lousy dumb B-grade monster movie, or it’s a great dumb B-grade monster movie. As soon as someone told star Treat Williams “I thought you’d be... older”, I know which it would be.

Williams stars as the shady captain of a ship, hired by mercenaries to take them to a spot in the ocean. As the quote above indicates, he is kind of doing Snake Plisskin. He works with a cute Asian, Una Damon, and a stoner mechanic, Kevin J. O’Connor (AKA, Oddball from Kelly’s Heroes). The mercenaries are lead by our current favorite Native American actor, Wes Studi, and the team include Djimon Hounsou.

Meanwhile, on a luxury liner also somewhere at sea, owner Anthony Heald is telling his rich patrons what a great time they are going to have on his ship. Meanwhile, someone is sabotaging the radio. And something huge is spotted on sonar, rising up out of the deep directly below the ship. Soon, there’s a hole in the ship and some kind of monsters are killing the clients.

As you probably guessed, the mercenaries are planning to rob the ship. But when they get there, they find nothing but blood stains in a wallowing, disabled ship. The only survivor seems to be a passenger, glamorous jewel thief Famke Janssen, who had been locked in the brig/pantry.

Now we get “Alien in the Poseidon Adventure” - a small group in a wallowing ship (it doesn’t seem to be actually sinking) getting picked off by a monster or monsters that could be anywhere. Yes, even to the old “something’s dripping on your head, you look up and...” gag. And they have to swim underwater through a flooded corridor, in a scene that had us singing, “There’s got to be a morning after”. (Note: we haven’t seen Poseidon Adventure, but we have read the MAD magazine parody, “The Poopside-Down Adventure”.)

We found this to be a very satisfying romp. Each trope or homage (Janssen’s character’s name was Trillian, like in Hitchhiker’s Guide) let us know that they knew what they were doing. Treat Williams was a respectable bad-ass, Famke Janssen made a good crook, Wes Studi had a great death. And it all ended with a sequel setup. That sequel never happened, but if it had, we would have watched it.