"...Deep Blue Sea...gleefully flies the flag for every hideously dated horror movie cliché in existence, most of which...were dated in 1957...."

Who says they're not making 'em like they used to?  A recent fishy fright film seems to be a throwback to the schlock shockers of decades past.  Read on and you'll see how Hollywood has evolved...

By DAVE DUGGINS

Last month we went back in time a bit to dig up a bad movie ("From B-Movie Hell It Came"). I do that a lot. This month, however, I’m out to prove that you don’t have to travel to 1957 to find a real dog. The last few years – and the success of Wes Craven’s "Scream" franchise – have ushered in a new era of horror film popularity. For those of us who swear by the genre, this can only be a good thing – more films to see, new directors bringing fresh approaches and visual panache to old subjects (Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty, Peter Hyams’ The Relic).

Of course, this also means more crap. Somebody halfway famous once said that 90% of everything is crap, which means that for every flick like The Faculty, there are nine horror movies that suck.

I will only bludgeon you with one this month, but I’ll be keeping a sharp eye out for the other eight. In the meantime, Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for…1999!

It’s a short trip, isn’t it? Barely an eyeblink. Less than a year ago, this ripe chunk of bilge-pump outflow was hyped as a summer blockbuster, one of those big movies, a must-see. Pick your cliché…but when you actually see the movie, don’t expect it to live up to the hype.

Quick! Somebody name a famous horror movie about a giant great white shark.

Did you pick Deep Blue Sea?

Probably not, I’m thinking.

See, this is what the filmmakers didn’t consider when they were messing around with their "shark movie" concept: in order to really make the film something special, it would have to be better than Jaws. I mean, if it were me reading the script, I would have said "not just no, but hell no" as soon as I realized that the monster was a shark. It doesn’t really matter that it’s a genetically manipulated, bigger, stronger, super-smart shark. Spielberg’s shark was all that and they didn’t even mess with his genetics. Spielberg’s shark – and his movie – were scary as hell.

The sharks in Deep Blue Sea may be smart, but all the humans are dumb. Boy, are they dumb. Even Dr. Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows of Wing Commander), the scientist chick who came up with the idea of extracting shark brains to combat Alzheimer’s, is damned dumb. She’s smart enough to increase the size of a shark’s brain by five times to harvest more brain juice, but too stupid to consider that it might make the shark a little brighter. Seriously! When finally confronted, she admits that she broke the rules by performing illegal and immoral genetic games with the fishies, shuffling and spinning DNA like a Rubik’s cube. "As a side effect," she says, "they got smarter." No kidding! She didn’t see that coming? Where’d you get your biochemistry degree, girl? Out of a box of Cracker Jacks?

That’s halfway through the movie, but you pretty much know you’re doomed to mediocrity from the first couple of scenes. The entire film seems to have been shot using dubbed sound for the dialogue, and the dubbing is atrocious, which gives it an appropriate "foreign cheapie film" kind of vibe, like one of those Mexican horror wrestling quickies.

And the dialogue itself? Priceless. These are a few of the things our characters actually say:

"Beneath its glassy surface … a world of gliding monsters."

Very poetic. Totally unbelievable. Here’s a couple of typical exchanges between characters:

"What in God’s creation--?"

"Not his. Ours."

"I’ll be damned!"

"For six seconds, you saw what it was like not to be damned."

That a good measure of this stuff is spoken by Samuel L. Jackson helps matters not a bit. He’s a really good actor, for God’s sake! What is he doing in this thing? He has no real role, and apart from spewing these little horrible tidbits of artificial movie-speak and checking out in a cartoonishly violent death scene, he doesn’t really do anything either. Makes me wonder if there was something decent in the script he saw that just didn’t make it to the screen. Makes me wonder if there’s a really good film on the cutting room floor, like Russ Mulcahy’s original vision of Highlander II: The Quickening. That’s the problem with creativity by committee: sometimes, the vintage is so watered down, there’s nothing left of the original bouquet.

But wait, I was getting serious for a moment! I can’t thoughtfully entertain the idea of Deep Blue Sea as a good film under any circumstances, because there are just too many things wrong with it. It is unabashedly, unashamedly unoriginal. It gleefully flies the flag for every hideously dated horror movie cliché in existence, most of which – as you may remember from last month’s tree-stump-from-hell debacle – were dated in 1957.

Why are screenwriters still trucking them out in 1999? Your guess is as good as mine. I find it hard to believe that students are learning this in USC’s screenwriting classes. I pray to God they’re not learning to write like this in USC’s screenwriting classes. Then again, maybe the problem in this case is a lack of education on the part of screenwriters Duncan Kennedy and Donna Powers. Okay, so Powers has written some episodes of The Equalizer. But Kennedy’s last (and apparently only) credit is as an art department assistant on Terminator 2! Does that hurt your head or what?

You could set a template over the script and characters would pop up in all the appropriate cutouts. There are several Mad Scientists, but one is the Baron Frankenstein of the bunch, while the rest are just Hunchback Assistants with more lines. There’s one Tough Guy Hero with a Soft Heart (Thomas Jane – where have I seen him before?). This guy could be the Frankie Avalon type in Horror of Party Beach, or young Steve McQueen as the alienated teen protagonist of The Blob, or the guy whose crazy story nobody believes in Invasion of the Saucer Men.

Worst of all is the Cook. I’m really, really surprised that LL Cool J agreed to do this movie, because this character is actually two cliches in one: the Comic Relief and the Token Black Man. He even has the Pet that People do Stupid Things to Save, just like Sigourney Weaver in Alien. Bad taste, guys.

None of the characters are likeable. The all come across as arrogant, self-serving, belligerent, or a combination of the three. When one of the Hunchback Assistants gets his arm chomped off, I found myself thinking: good! He deserved it. When Samuel Jackson got chomped, I just breathed a sigh of relief. Hey, at least he doesn’t have to slog through the third act. They plod through their lines and actions with palpable disinterest, which might have something to do with the fact that none of them do anything that has not been a staple of horror movies for the past seventy years. And speaking of Sigourney Weaver, Saffron Burrows even finds an excuse to strip down to her underwear to battle the shark. It’s the weakest possible excuse, but … hey, it’s a tradition for a scantily-clad female to be threatened by the monster, so Kennedy and Powers dutifully chuck it in there.

As Stephen King says, it’s a dance … but surely we’ve come up with a few new steps between now and then.

Even digital special effects technology can’t redeem this thing. As an aside concerning CGI in general, I have to say that this new toy on the block was used to excellent effect in Jurassic Park…and rarely since. In worst-case scenarios (some of the more elaborate effects setups from Lost in Space, for instance), the shots still have a grainy, overprinted look, with the second-generation sprites appearing much more clearly defined than their first-generation live action counterparts.

In Deep Blue Sea, the sharks just look fake. They don’t move like real sharks. They don’t look like real sharks at all. They look like souped-up cartoons, which is exactly what they are, but I don’t think that’s the effect the filmmakers were looking for. Models were used for some of the shots, and that’s exactly what they look like. That’s forgiveable as far as I’m concerned. I love models. Especially bad models. We’re talking more SF here than horror, but who can forget the obvious tabletops of Thunderbirds? How about Logan’s Run? Doctor Who? It’s even more fun when they blow the stuff up. Marvelous. Here, the only shark that blows up is digitized. It’s an unfulfilling experience. They also came up with this gimmicky Shark-Vision thing, which recalls older version of the same thing involving Vaseline on the camera lens while shooting through fishbowls and kaleidoscopes and such. Lame. Lame twenty years ago.

Throw it all in the cinematic cuisinart and what spews out is a fine grist for the bad movie mill. It’s encouraging to me that, with the billion-dollar financing major studio projects command, a film like this can still manage to look like ten bucks, while a couple of independents with a video camera can make The Blair Witch Project look like a masterpiece on the kind of money the average schoolteacher makes in a year. Bravo!

Just think...some day when "Generation Y" looks back on the bad films they love to hate, Deep Blue Sea will no doubt make their Top Ten List.  Cheers!

Article copyright Dave Duggins

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