DeepStar Six (1989)

directed by Sean S. Cunningham

USA

105 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I think I might have mentioned before that I'm strangely fond of big mainstream sci-fi films (especially SF/horror hybrids) from the late 1980s and 1990s. I'm not quite sure what it is about them, because I normally favor indie film most of the time, but a lot of movies like this have an inherent competency to their production that I don't find in mainstream film today. I try to avoid being a purist and/or curmudgeon as much as I can, but cinema is one area where I think that the adage "they don't make 'em like they used to" is absolutely true, and I don't care how it makes me sound. Today's blockbusters and those of the late 20th century may be the same in that they're intended to make money and fill seats, but older movies just feel like they have more soul to them because you can tell that they were made by hand instead of by an overworked computer-effects team figuring out how to make actors talking to green-screened ping-pong balls look authentic.

So it's no surprise that what stuck out to me most about DeepStar Six is the practical effects. There's surprisingly little creature in this feature, at least up until the final act, but the miniature work used on the undersea bases and equipment is no less impressive, both internal shots and external. I love nothing more than a good analog-era space (or deep sea) ship console with as many knobs and switches as you can fit on there. I'm fully aware that the dated look of the base's and the submersibles' internals is not intentional and that it was simply the level that technology was at at the time, but I still find it significant that the set designers chose not to look forward in time and create an environment that was more futuristic than recognizable. They didn't make everything sleek, lightweight, and transparent; they didn't imagine how technology might look once improved upon. They used CRT televisions; monitors that still have "degauss" buttons next to them. This is equipment that (generally - there is of course some embellishment, but it's not unrealistic) would be familiar to audiences at the time. The film takes existing technology and applies it in such a way that it still sparks the imagination without depicting anything "new".

A lot of time is spent watching the crew go about their operations in the deep-sea base, so it's good that the miniatures and internals look so believable. Your mileage may vary, but I didn't find myself getting bored in this time before things started to significantly go downhill, since the cast seems to work well together and have been well-chosen for their roles (except for Nia Peeples, who was getting on my nerves because for some reason she sounded like an audiobook narrator on fast-forward). There's a large enough group in the base that interpersonal conflicts are not too much of a focus; one or two members don't get along, but infighting isn't a big thing, thankfully. I think it was recognized that this was not the type of movie where watching people bicker among themselves would be at all beneficial to the sense of tension or fear. For whatever reason, it stuck out to me that the women among the crew seemed to have the least to do with one another - I don't know if this was a deliberate choice to counteract the stereotype of women being competitive and catty, but it almost felt like an Alien situation where the characters weren't written with an assigned gender until an actor was found for that role.

Sean S. Cunningham is probably best known for Friday the 13th, which is interesting because in a lot of ways this movie really does follow the slasher format, just underwater, and with a huge prehistoric bug as the killer instead of Jason. People get picked off one by one, but in a subversion of the tropes that Friday the 13th would set out for slasherdom forevermore, the people who have sex are the ones who survive. And for a while it's actually things unrelated to the creature that claim lives: Mechanical failures, accidents of timing, etc. In my opinion it adds to the mystique of the creature that the fallout from it barely brushing against the human sphere is so devastating, even well before it makes a physical appearance. McBride's drastic act at the end to kill a single creature might feel like overkill, but with the damage it did to one deep-sea base, it's not hard to imagine the ramifications if that creature had managed to escape to the surface and the world at large.

And oh boy, what a creature. Again, this is where older movies have the upper hand against the modern. There are CGI-based monsters that I am tremendously fond of, and that I feel exist as fleshed-out entities thanks to the lore surrounding them (the creatures from the A Quiet Place and Cloverfield films, just to name two), but few, if any, computer-rendered monsters achieve that sense of physicality that a practical-effects monster can. The thing in DeepStar Six feels - and looks - like an animal, a predator, a living thinking being with a will and intent that stalks the crew, yes, like a serial killer picking them off. There are scary things about a creature that is not intelligent, operating solely on instinct and god forgive anything and anybody that gets in its way, but there are also scary things about a creature that is cognizant of its surroundings, and our arthropod friend marries both aspects. Ultimately its instinct to follow light is its doom, but despite it being enormous and looking unwieldy when contained in the confined space of an airlock, it also is able to be stealthy and elude a room full of humans who are actively looking for it.

I don't know what else to say about this movie, really, other than it just feels like something that hits all the right beats. It's not unconventional at all and delivers an ending that is predictable and safe, but from beginning to end I was never bored even though I watched this because I wanted to watch a monster movie and the monster takes up maybe 10% of the running time. I'm not sure what the audience reaction was to this at the time, and it's entirely possible that people could have lamented how contentless modern sci-fi was in the same way that I am now, but if anything came out today with even remotely the same level of technical mastery behind the effects, that released widely instead of being relegated to art-house cinemas or streaming services, I would be blown away.